Digital Addiction: How Half the Developed World Got Hooked on the Internet

It’s not your screen you’re addicted to — it’s just the conduit for your high. NYU professor Adam Alter explains that behavioral addiction is similar to substance addiction: it feels good in the short term, but over time can negatively impact your mental state, social life, financial stability, and physiological wellbeing. There’s been a steep takeoff of digital addiction in recent years, with approximately half the developed world now exhibiting addictive tendencies when it comes to the internet. It comes down to portability. The more wireless our devices become, the more our addiction follows us around, and the more we turn to our phones as “adult pacifiers” — just a swipe of your screen is enough to feel relaxed again. Adam Alter is the author of Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked

Transcript:

Behavioral addiction is a lot like substance addiction in a lot of ways, but it’s much newer. So substance addiction obviously involves the ingestion of a substance, and in the short-term that feels good, and in the long-term it harms your well being in some respects. It can be physiological, it can be psychological, it can harm your social life, it can cause you to spend too much money, it can have a lot of negative effects on your life. Behavioral addiction is similar; the big difference though is that behavioral addiction does not involve the ingestion of a substance, and it’s much newer, it’s a much more recent phenomenon.

So substance addiction has been around for a very long time, by some accounts for many thousands of years, but there weren’t behaviors around that were compelling enough to rise to the level of addiction until quite recently. And the reason is that, for them to be addictive, basically what has to happen is there’s a behavior that you enjoy doing in the short-term that you do compulsively. So you keep returning to it over and over again, but then in the long-term it harms your well-being. And it can, again, harm your well-being in lots of different respects, social, financial, physical, psychological.

And I think the reason why we’ve got these new forms of addiction, there are two main reasons: The first one is that technology is much more sophisticated and advanced than it was even 20 years ago. You’re able to deliver the kinds of rewards that you need for a system to be addictive. So basically what people are looking for is unpredictability and rapid feedback of either rewards (or if it’s negative then negative experiences), and you actually need that mix of positive and negative feedback.