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mancamikulic

Why We All Have 'Internet-Addiction Genes' - Robert Wright - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...262112

addiction internet human beings modern world habbit genes

shared by mancamikulic on 06 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • : A gene that seems to be (very modestly) correlated with internet addiction also plays a role in nicotine addiction.
  • A gene that seems to be (very modestly) correlated with internet addiction also plays a role in nicotine addiction.
  • internet addiction is not a figment of our imagination
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Whether heavy internet use deserves to be called an addiction or just a hard-to-break habit is a question about a behavior pattern and its attendant psychological states.
  • To answer it we ask such things as how strong the cravings for the internet are, what lengths a person will go to in order to satisfy them, and so on.
  • Human beings are biochemical machines "designed" by natural selection to, among other things, form habits.
  • The habit-forming machinery involves the release of reward chemicals, such as dopamine, that make us feel good upon attaining these goals
  • In the modern world, there are shortcuts to getting these rewards
  • And there's some evidence (though here I'm approaching the limits of my comprehension of the science) that people with a particular variant of a gene involved in building acetylcholine receptors are more susceptible to nicotine addiction than other people
  • the main point is this: the biochemical mechanisms (including genes) involved in chemical addictions will naturally be the mechanisms involved in habit formation more generally since habit formation is what they were originally designed for.
  • whether it's a habit or an addiction, it is going to involve pleasure-dispensing biochemical mechanisms of the sort that can get us addicted to such chemicals as nicotine and cocaine
  • After all, the internet, like these chemicals, allows us to trigger our neuronal reward mechanisms with much less work,
  • it wasn't possible, in a very small and technologically primitive social universe, to at any time of day launch an observation or joke
  • the internet, like a pack of cigarettes or lots of cocaine, lets you just sit in a room and repeatedly trigger reward chemicals that
  • And all of us have lots and lots of these genes--genes that make us susceptible to internet addiction.
  • some of these genes may vary from person to person in ways that make some people particularly susceptible to internet addiction
  • In fact, there will turn out to be so many genes which are so modestly correlated with internet addiction
  • that if journalists write stories every time such a gene is found, or is thought to have been found, they will find that they're not shedding much actual light on the situation.
  • These genes are really just genes for being human.
nikasvajncer

Addicted! Scientists show how internet dependency alters the human brain - Science - Ne... - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...s-the-human-brain-6288344.html

shared by nikasvajncer on 06 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Internet addiction
  • changes in the brain similar to those seen in people addicted to alcohol, cocaine and cannabis.
  • We are doing it because modern life requires us to link up over the net in regard to jobs, professional and social connections – but not in an obsessive way.
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  • "The majority of people we see with serious internet addiction are gamers – people who spend long hours in roles in various games that cause them to disregard their obligations. I have seen people who stopped attending university lectures, failed their degrees or their marriages broke down because they were unable to emotionally connect with anything outside the game."
  • spent many hours on the internet,
  • you know they have a problem
  • "The limitations [of this study] are that it is not controlled, and it's possible that illicit drugs, alcohol or other caffeine-based stimulants might account for the changes. The specificity of 'internet addiction disorder' is also questionable."
  • emotional processing, attention, decision making and cognitive control.
  • "internet addiction disorder"
  • In a groundbreaking study, researchers used MRI scanners to reveal abnormalities in the brains of adolescents who spent many hours on the internet, to the detriment of their social and personal lives.
  • An estimated 5 to 10 per cent of internet users are thought to be addicted – meaning they are unable to control their use.
  • "The majority of people we see with serious internet addiction are gamers – people who spend long hours in roles in various games that cause them to disregard their obligations.
Blaž Gobec

SXSW 2011: The internet is over | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...sxsw-2011-internet-online

sxsw future guardian trends internet over

shared by Blaž Gobec on 01 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • After three days he found it: the boundary between 'real life' and 'online' has disappeared
  • If my grandchildren ever ask me where I was when I realised the internet was over – they won't, of course, because they'll be too busy playing with the teleportation console
  • If Web 2.0 was the moment when the collaborative promise of the internet seemed finally to be realised – with ordinary users creating instead of just consuming, on sites from Flickr to Facebook to Wikipedia – Web 3.0 is the moment they forget they're doing it. When the GPS system in your phone or iPad can relay your location to any site or device you like
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • when Facebook uses facial recognition on photographs posted there, when your financial transactions are tracked, and when the location of your car can influence a constantly changing, sensor-driven congestion-charging scheme, all in real time, something has qualitatively changed. You're still creating the web, but without the conscious need to do so. "Our phones and cameras are being turned into eyes and ears for applications,"
  • Videogame designers, the logic goes, have become the modern world's leading experts on how to keep users excited, engaged and committed: the success of the games industry proves that, whatever your personal opinion of Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft.
  • Three billion person-hours a week are spent gaming. Couldn't some of that energy be productively harnessed?
  • His take on the education system, for example, is that it is a badly designed game: students compete for good grades, but lose motivation when they fail.
  • A good game, by contrast, never makes you feel like you've failed: you just progress more slowly. Instead of giving bad students an F, why not start all pupils with zero points and have them strive for the high score?
  • "is an interactive technology inspired by snakes."
  • the internet is distracting if it stops you from doing what you really want to be doing; if it doesn't, it isn't. Similarly, warnings about "internet addiction" used to sound like grandparental cautions against the evils of rock music; scoffing at the very notion was a point of pride for those who identified themselves with the future. But you can develop a problematic addiction to anything: there's no reason to exclude the internet,
  • we come to treat ourselves, in subtle ways, like computers. We drive ourselves to cope with ever-increasing workloads by working longer hours, sucking down coffee and spurning recuperation. But "we were not meant to operate as computers do," Schwartz says. "We are meant to pulse." When it comes to managin
  • g our own energy, he insists, we must replace a linear perspective with a cyclical one: "We live by the myth that the best way to get more work done is to work longer hours."
Sandra Hribar

Twitter and Facebook 'harming children's development' - Telegraph - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...ing-childrens-development.html

shared by Sandra Hribar on 08 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • A generation of children risks growing up with obsessive personalities, poor self-control, short attention spans and little empathy because of an addiction to social networking websites such as Twitter, a leading neuroscientist has warned
Nuša Gregoršanec

Free of the Deadly Internet! » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...free-of-the-deadly-internet

distraction freedom productivity stupidification

shared by Nuša Gregoršanec on 07 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Free of the Deadly Internet!
  • The computer and its connection to the mass mind is but a tool, an appropriate technology if properly used.  But it is not properly used.  It dominates, so that the user is the used, and the user, like the addict,  weakens at every return.
  • I go to a cabin in Utah where there is no Internet, no telephone line, no cellphone signal. What happens with only the wretched self and the empty page? 
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  • Thousands of words – good words, worth keeping – are written in a few days of deep concentration where it would have taken weeks to produce the same amount exposed to the fool’s continuum of constant access to the hive mind and the blinking screen.
  • As we engage more and more with the flitting of the Internet’s slipstream, it rewires our minds to be less than we are capable of, less than we imagined, less we hoped for – it is stupefying and stupidifying.  We leap from one small object to another, like children chasing bubbles.  We click on the links. We click and clack and turn and toss in an “ecosystem of interruption technologies.”   We become less able to think deeply, to encompass ambiguities, nuances, to hold with a single thought and parse it out.
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