Digital addiction: Focusing on the cure, not the disease

Anecdotally, the times in my life when I was the least addicted to digital media were in my teens, when I had a big circle of people I spent time with. If you can choose between going out having fun with people and staying home playing videogames, the former wins every time.

It is only later, when my friendships and acquaitances faded, that I turned to digital media, because there's just nothing to do. My family is not really a fun bunch, and except for playing an instrument or reading books, I don't know how to spend time. Combine that with work-related stress and unreasonable effectiveness of video games at providing an immersive, relaxing experience, and you get a perfect recipe for addiction - I get home every day, bad mood, bad thoughts in my head, stress keeping me on the edge, and I have to choose whether to play some videogames to relax, or to stay stressed out for the sake of "not being addicted". Every time, the former wins by far.

All addiction (food, drugs, digital media) has one thing in common - people running away from problems and stress. The only thing that can beat addiction is solving those.

Digital media is the opiate of the masses.

You can also do similar things for work related notifications (ie. I had github and slack apps automatically muted after 5pm). I find that the approach of letting the notifications pile up and then checking at my leisure let’s me slowly start to forget about my phone except when it serves an actual purpose.

I agree, it's impossible to replace something without filling the hole it left in your life. I needed to have something I could do when I had evenings free or a weekend to kill. For me, I filled it with sports/working-out, miniature painting, writing fiction, and making (speakers, dioramas, gadgets, and other fun things I find on Hackster.io).

My life is so much more fulfilling now. I've shifted from one of sedative consumptive to active creation. I can't recommend it enough.

This isn’t to say that social media companies should be excused, and I suspect only regulation will force them to change.

But it’s also up to individuals to take an active role in stopping and finding healthier outlets. For me, that had meant deleting apps, mostly getting off of Reddit, and intentionally building new habits that are not oriented around social media. Getting out in nature is more important than I think most realize.

One need only look at the continued existence of smokers/smoking to highlight that short of an outright ban (which would cause other issues), the person is really at the center of quitting. Even if these companies started getting all of the appropriate blame today, that’s not going to change that people have possibly difficult changes to make. There is no magic or shortcut that undoes the habit patterns without the individual choosing to make changes and following through on implementing them.

Like most additions it’s a question of actual harm not the public’s acceptance. Thus millions of regular drinkers aren’t all alcoholics but there are also plenty of alcoholics. When someone with a reasonable income is losing their house after maxing their credit cards because they can’t stop buying loot boxes, it’s a really obvious problem.

Newspapers and radio didn't result in people spending 40+ hours a week following the news. There probably are some people addicted to TV, but it's such a minority that we don't consider it an issue.

your assertion is false. There are pragmatic and meaningful differences between different media and communications technologies, and these differences have been remarked upon and considered for decades.

It is neither controversial nor remarkable nor indeed anything but common knowledge that algorithmic social media > social media > online media > televised media > radio > print for a related constellation of properties—many of which related, by design, to our relationship and attention to them.

Our attention and reward systems in specific have been the explicit and focused target of billions of dollars of R&D and product testing, with the result that the dopamine pellet conditioning paradigm of contemporary social media and related online properties, are literally unlike anything we have encountered as a species before, and no exaggeration to say, that we are utterly defenseless in the face of.

Understanding the mechanisms of attention and reward manipulation, and of the consequent utility and increasing application of such factors in service of using these systems as mechanisms of social influence and behavioral conditioning, is no defense. No more than understanding the mechanisms of the appeal to us of fat, salt, and sugar, or for that matter alcohol, nicotine, or opiates, is.

There is no defense other than opting out, tuning out, blocking out. And that is not defense against being surveilled.

Should we call meticulously tuned conditioned behavior addiction? Depends on the forum. Addiction medicine specialists will no doubt have their own opinion.

For the rest of us, yes, it's obviously and undeniably addiction, in the lay sense, and this entirely by design.

You can't even begin to imagine what it's like because you're some old guy but these kids who don't know any difference have absolutely devastated their reward mechanisms. A newspaper is easy to skim in a half hour, you might be bored enough to re-read all the articles if you had nothing else to do. These devices however are constantly spewing out limitless novel information which creates FOMO dependency. Youth have had an infinite supply of 4K resolution stimulation in front of their faces ever since they could communicate. Persuaded by the biggest communications platforms to ever exist, and their algorithms to manipulate emotions and desires.

These youth have been primed to be constantly engaged consumers by decades of advertising, technology, psychological studying and implementation. You are seen as "weird" if you don't have a social media that is posted on frequently. People cannot focus on reading a book anymore. People prefer to document an experience rather than "living in it".

> Mar 15, 2023 — According to data from DataReportal, the average American spends 6 hours and 59 minutes looking at a screen every day.

Walk around without your phone, and you'll probably notice that you find yourself checking your pocket to pull-out your phone, at least I do.

Machine learning and adaptive gameplay ensures that players are always on the verge of the next dopamine hit, and when the time is right, a pay to win screen is shoved in their face.

People spend hundreds of dollars on mobile experiences that they actively do not enjoy, it is behavioral manipulation of the worst sort.

We need more regulation. For starters, gacha game mechanics should be banned. After that, adaptive algorithms should be looked into. It is really easy for a ML algorithm to find someone who is depressed and start feeding them more and more depressing content, ensuring engagement. Same goes for extremism of any type, or really any extreme ends of the human psychological spectrum, except, and this may be a sad statement on the nature of humanity, of positive emotions, the activation which do not create long term engagement.

I'd wager the view is different from the inside. Communities of any kind can be condemned one way or another from the outside. The weekly potlucks and choirs still exist and I'll bet you way fewer Christian parents (of whatever denomination) see a gay child as a sin than whenever it was that you grew up.

> I don't think that as a society we have figured out what the next evolution of community looks like.

Honestly, it might look like a society in which people go back to church.

The Skinner boxes that are engineered into social media is a huge part of addiction. Social media is filled with digital versions of the psychological traps found in casinos. Social media weaponized dopamine.

I don't really disagree with the rest of your points, and I can be convinced that churches have gotten incrementally more political since 2008, but I don't think the differences are quite as stark as you say. Churches have been political and cruel to out-groups for a long time.

I suspect that some of the perceived difference can be ascribed to experiencing church as a child vs. experiencing it as an adult.

In my neck of the woods, being gay was not acceptable, we would constantly use homophobic slurs, and being trans (not a cross dresser, but actually changing gender/sex) was treated fairly similarly to insanity.

Nowadays, IME most people think that being gay is acceptable and unless they live fairly rurally or something probably have gay friends, and mostly people recognise the validity of being transgender but still find it a bit of an "out there" lifestyle choice.

I don't buy the idea that the Christian community were more supportive of these things before and things have regressed. I think you just care about them more now for whatever reason.

While everyone likes to generalize their church experience as “the church”, the fact is that the experience of the church, even at a given point in time, varies a lot by particular church community (parish/congregation/etc.), even within thr same larger organization.

> Today we see things like christian parents abandoning their gay children, wanting to “cure” trans people, or “christians” voting for trump and it’s clear that religion and therefore, for many, community has been corrupted by politics

None of this is new. I grew up in great, accepting Church communities in the 1970s and 1980s, but even as a kid I knew those weren’t the only kind.

And even then, religious organizations being deeply involved in and affecte by basic political disputes (on every side) wasn’t new. We (and the institutions themselves) tend to celebrate it for institutions that were on what is, in retrospect, seen as the right side, but a view of history that only pays attention to the history people like to talk about is misleading.

I think we’ve seen this shift already. Community can be found through sports, classes, meetups, and in many more traditional areas of the world still through village/city public events and festivals.

As far as “Prayer community,” I think it will always serve an important role in connecting people who share a common faith and for who that faith is an essential way through which they look at the world. If not through Church or established religions, I think we are increasingly seeing the emergence of people organizing around opportunities for personal development (which is a key function of religions). Topics like interpersonal awareness, deepening of physical and emotional intimacy, etc.

People seemingly enjoy connecting around a shared desire for growth. Now, this comes with its own set of issues and potential for abuse/deception. But that’s my gut feeling for where we’re headed.