Rupert Murdoch’s media have been a key source of moral panic about the internet and technology — see, for example, this from his Times declaring that phones are “dope” that imprison us all in an epidemic of addiction causing cognitive decline:
On the latest episode of This Week in Google, we discussed parents’ legitimate concerns about their children’s technology use as they seek help in monitoring and managing it, as cohost Paris Martineau explores in her excellent reporting. I challenge the assumption of addiction in framing the discussion and read bit from my new book, The Web We Weave, so I thought I’d share the rest, in which I look at the source of the addiction argument regarding the internet and now phones:
In July 1996 — only two years after the introduction of the Netscape web browser — Columbia University psychiatry professor Ivan Goldberg posted a notice to an online bulletin board he founded, intending to parody the language of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the profession’s encyclopedia of mental disorders. Goldberg announced criteria for a new diagnosis: internet addiction. The astute might have noticed the word “humor” in the announcement’s URL or the odd symptoms listed: “voluntary or involuntary typing movements of the fingers.” Even so, folks appeared on the bulletin board, claiming they suffered the ailment he had just concocted, so he kept the joke going by creating the Internet Addiction Support Group, even though he believed that “support groups for internet addiction made about as much sense as support groups for coughing.”
Goldberg regretted the coinage of internet addiction disorder. “I.A.D. is a very unfortunate term,” he told The New Yorker. “It makes it sound as if one were dealing with heroin, a truly addicting substance that can alter almost every cell in the body. To medicalize every behavior by putting it into psychiatric nomenclature is ridiculous. If you expand the concept of addiction to include everything people can overdo, then you must talk about people being addicted to books, addicted to jogging, addicted to other people.”
Kimberly Young founded the Center for Internet Addiction and in 1996 presented a paper to the American Psychological Association declaring “the emergence of a new clinical disorder: internet addiction.” Mind you, = Google didn’t come along until two years later in 1998, Facebook until 2004, YouTube in 2005, and Twitter in 2006. She declared that folks had become addicted to the crude, slow, ugly — and expensive — early web. Young modeled her definition of internet addiction on pathological gambling and created questionnaires to measure the affliction’s severity: “How often do you find you stay online longer than you intended? . . . How often do you neglect household chores to spend more time online? . . . How often do you form new relationships with fellow online users? . . . How often do you snap, yell, or act annoyed if someone bothers you while you are online? . . . How often do you fear that life without the internet would be boring, empty, and joyless?” How would any of us answer those questions — about the internet or a binge-worthy TV show or good book?
Young advertised for volunteers for her first study from Goldberg’s parody Internet Addiction Support Group as well as a Webaholics Support Group — hardly representative populations. On that basis she
declared the condition serious, with 98 percent of people reporting moderate or severe impairment in work and relationships. She layered the report with anecdata: “Dependents gradually spent less time with real people in their lives in exchange for solitary time in front of a computer.” Thirty-five percent of her dependent subjects said they spent time in chat rooms, 28 percent in multiuser games, 15 percent in news discussion groups, and 13 percent in email — all of which entails interacting with people I would classify as real. “Initially,” Young continued, “Dependents [her capitalization] tended to use the Internet as an excuse to avoid needed but reluctantly performed daily chores. . . . For example, one mother forgot such things as to pick up her children from school, to make them dinner, and to put them to bed because she became so absorbed in her Internet use.” I cannot help but be reminded of a critic writing of novels in 1795: “My sight is every-where offended by these foolish, yet dangerous, books. I have actually seen mothers, in miserable garrets, crying for the imaginary distress of an heroine, while their children were crying for bread.”
Young was not alone in sounding the alarm. Psychology Today declared in 1998, “Internet users who become addicted to online activity usually face divorce, unemployment, financial and legal difficulties and child neglect.” Usually? The magazine said unnamed experts estimated that for as many as five million Americans, “the Internet has become a destructive force.” Only two years later, in 2000, Psychology Today upped the ante to estimate that 25 million Americans “qualify as compulsive surfers.” At least the magazine exercised sufficient self-awareness to note, “Today, so-called addictions are everywhere: sex, exercise, work, chocolate, TV, shopping, and now the Internet. Have we been, well, abusing the word?”
Young founded the first inpatient hospital clinic for internet addiction in Pittsburgh. Others followed. In 2009, two therapists founded reSTART atop “Serenity Mountain,” twenty-five miles from Microsoft’s headquarters in Washington, to treat teens and young adults for a long list of alleged ailments associated with the net: screen dependence (now including virtual reality), internet gaming disorder, gambling, compulsive shopping, social-media use, and intimacy disorder. The program costs a reported $18,000 to $20,000 per month. Inpatient programs run two to twelve months, then reSTART offers off-campus living in “tech-limited” apartments, for six to twenty-four months, followed by ongoing coaching. I do not diminish the painful reality of compulsive behavior around any activity and its connection to co-occurring conditions, including depression, anxiety, ADD/ADHD, and personality disorders. Often internet use is a symptom of other issues — and sometimes a salve for them, a way to grapple with concerns we all can share, like loneliness. If there is an internet pathology, how prevalent might it be? We do not know, for there is as yet no agreement even on definitions, in spite of almost five thousand papers on “internet addiction” appearing on the National Institute of Health’s database.
Mark Griffiths wrote the first academic paper examining the idea of internet addiction, in 1996. He questioned Young’s research: “It is unlikely that very many of her dependent Internet users was a bona fide Internet addict.” Writing in 2003, he noted that “the Internet can be used to counteract other deficiencies in the person’s life (e.g. relationships, lack of friends, physical appearance, disability, coping, etc.)” and that “text-based relationship can obviously be rewarding for some people.” In another paper, he proposed that “many of these excessive users are not ‘Internet addicts’ but just use the Internet excessively as a medium to fuel other addictions.”
Griffiths’ observation speaks to much controversy about the net: it is blamed as the cause of many ills when often it is merely a conduit for them. I emailed Griffiths and asked whether his opinion had changed in the intervening decades of research. He replied with a paper that expressed his current view: “There are also much wider problems with the use of the term ‘internet addiction’: though the number of studies in the field of internet addiction has certainly grown, most have really investigated addictions on the internet rather than to the internet. . . . In short, the overwhelming majority of so-called internet addicts are no more addicted to the internet than alcoholics are addicted to the actual bottle.”
Not infrequently, writers call on biology to back up their claims of addiction, reporting that smartphones and their apps induce the production of dopamine, as drugs do. “Digital addictions are drowning us in dopamine,” claims a headline in The Wall Street Journal over a Stanford psychiatrist’s contention that the smartphone is “the equivalent of the hypodermic needle for a wired generation.” In The Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria decides that TikTok is “dangerously addictive” and must be regulated because it delivers dopamine. Except as Stetson University psychology professor Christopher Ferguson points out, “Anything fun results in an increased dopamine release in the ‘pleasure circuits’ of the brain — whether it’s going for a swim, reading a good book, having a good conversation, eating or having sex. Technology use causes dopamine release similar to other normal, fun activities: about 50 to 100 percent above normal levels.” That is versus cocaine, which increases it 350 percent, and methamphetamine, 1,200 percent. Says Ferguson, “Technology is not a drug.”
Nevertheless, journalists continue to insinuate that we are wired addicts. Forbes: “Digital Addiction: Should You Be Worried?” The BBC: “Is Internet Addiction a Growing Problem?” CNN: “How Much Screen Time Is Too Much?” They pose these headlines as questions because they don’t have the facts to back up their allegations. Let us note the irony of journalists crying addiction: news organizations themselves are dying to addict us. As with so many of the press’ charges against the net, it is that press that invented and perfected the crime.
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