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kinseyem

Addictive personality - 1 views

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    An addictive personality refers to a particular set of personality traits that make an individual predisposed to addictions. Many scientists[who? ] believe that addictive behaviors are defined by the "excessive, repetitive use of pleasurable activities to cope with unmanageable internal conflict, pressure, and stress."
kinseyem

Internet Addiction - 1 views

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    Internet addiction is described as an impulse control disorder, which does not involve use of an intoxicating drug and is very similar to pathological gambling. Some Internet users may develop an emotional attachment to on-line friends and activities they create on their computer screens.
kinseyem

How Internet Addiction Is Affecting Lives -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

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    How internet addiction is affecting our lives and mental health
marikejp

The Rise and Inglorious Fall of Myspace - Businessweek - 0 views

  • "After we left, the guys that took over were never Myspace users," says DeWolfe, who now runs a startup called MindJolt. "They didn't have it in their DNA."
  • One of the site's first breakthroughs, for example, came by accident. Shortly after launching in August 2003, Myspace developers realized they had accidentally permitted users to insert Web markup code, allowing them to play around with the background colors and personalize their pages, leading to the site's kaleidoscopic, techno-junkyard aesthetic, which became its trademark.
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    "Jackson still hustles for attention on the lower rungs of fame-he currently stars in season five of Celebrity Rehab, in which he battles his addiction to growth hormones for cable television viewers."
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    "Jackson still hustles for attention on the lower rungs of fame-he currently stars in season five of Celebrity Rehab, in which he battles his addiction to growth hormones for cable television viewers."
andhearsonars

Pinterest, Tumblr and the Trouble With 'Curation' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • evoke in the viewer a certain feeling, atmosphere or mood
  • Not just on Pinterest, but also in the form of dopamine-boosting street-fashion blogs and cryptically named Tumblr blogs devoted to the wordless and explanation-free juxtaposition of, say, cupcakes and teapots and shoes with shots of starched shirts and J.F.K.
  • artfully arranged pictures of other people’s stuff?
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  • “curation,”
  • rarefied and highly specialized skill, would all of a sudden go viral
  • Not because I don’t like magazines. In many ways, I like them better. But they’re too grounded in space and time, too organized and linear, too collaborative and professional to deliver the synaptic frisson available from the stream-of-consciousness image blog.
  • A friend of a friend calls his addiction to sites like these “avenues for procrastination,” but I think there’s something else involved. Like other forms of pastiche — the mix tape, the playlist, the mash-up — these sites force you to engage and derive meaning or at least significance or at the very least pleasure from a random grouping of pictures. Why not dive into an alternative world full of beauty and novelty and emotion and the hard-to-put-your-finger-on feeling that there’s something more, somewhere, where you’re not chained to your laptop, half dead from monotony, frustration and boredom
  • the sudden rise of the mood board as mood regulator, a kind of low-dose visual lithium
  • So maybe we are like the rats, and what we’re seeking while idly yet compulsively cruising Pinterest is really just the reliably unpredictable jumble of emotions that their wistful, quirky juxtapositions evoke. Maybe that is our rectangularity.
  • This is, I think, what these sites evoke: the feeling of being addicted to longing for something; specifically being addicted to the feeling that something is missing or incomplete. The point is not the thing that is being longed for, but the feeling of longing for the thing.
  • In other words, your average Pinterest board or inspiration Tumblr basically functions as a longing machine.
  • They target aspects of our lives that “are incomplete or imperfect”; involve “overly positive, idealized, utopian imaginations of these missing aspects”; focus on “incompleteness on the one hand and fantasies about ideal, alternative realities on the other hand”
  • frivolous and feminine
  • People don’t post stuff because they wish they owned it, but because they think they are it, and they long to be understood, which is different.
  • In fact, the company discourages people from posting images they have created themselves, preferring that they venture out into the wilds of the Internet looking for beautiful things to bring back to the cave.
  • “Curation” does imply something far more deliberate than these inspiration blogs, whose very point is to put the viewer into an aesthetic reverie unencumbered by thought or analysis. These sites are not meant (as curation is) to make us more conscious, but less so.
  • But products are no longer the point. The feeling is the point. And now we can create that feeling for ourselves, then pass it around like a photo album of the life we think we were meant to have but don’t, the people we think we should be but aren’t.
marikejp

The Rise and Inglorious Fall of Myspace - Businessweek - 0 views

  • And it was becoming clear that Myspace's global effort—fueled by extravagant new offices around the world (the Smashing Pumpkins headlined the rollout in Madrid)—wasn't working. Facebook was attracting international users at a rapid rate without the expense of opening offices. Facebook was winning.
  • "O.K., so you're going to have three guys to run this company that have really never worked together and have really never been on the site and don't really understand it?" DeWolfe asks. "It was a bad decision."
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    "Jackson still hustles for attention on the lower rungs of fame-he currently stars in season five of Celebrity Rehab, in which he battles his addiction to growth hormones for cable television viewers."
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    "Jackson still hustles for attention on the lower rungs of fame-he currently stars in season five of Celebrity Rehab, in which he battles his addiction to growth hormones for cable television viewers."
George Neff

Your Brain While Watching Orange Is the New Black - Shape Magazine - 0 views

  • Like a perfectly addictive drug, almost every aspect of the television viewing experience grabs and holds your brain’s attention, which explains why it’s so tough to stop watching after just one (or three) episodes of Orange is the New Black.
  • Characters run or shout or shoot accompanied by sound effects and music. No two moments are quite alike. To your brain, this kind of continuously morphing sensory stimulation is pretty much impossible to ignore, explains Robert F. Potter, Ph.D., director of the Institute for Communication Research at Indiana University.
  • “Our brains are hardwired to automatically pay attention to anything that’s new in our environment, at least for a brief period of time,” he explains. And it’s not just humans; all animals evolved this way in order to spot potential threats, food sources, or reproductive opportunities, Potter says.
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  • “This also explains how you can sit in front of the TV and binge for hours and hours at a time and not feel a loss of entertainment,” he says. “You brain doesn’t have much time to grow bored.”
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Studies show that, by this point, most of your brain activity has shifted from the left hemisphere to the right, or from the areas involved with logical thought to those involved with emotion. There has also been a release of natural, relaxing opiates called endorphins, research indicates.
  • You’re noodle isn’t really analyzing or picking apart the data it’s receiving. It’s basically just absorbing. Potter calls this “automatic attention.” He says, “The television is just washing over you and your brain is marinating in the changes of sensory stimuli.”
  • At the same time, the content of your television show is lighting up your brain’s approach and avoid systems, Potter says. Put simply, your brain is pre-programmed for both attraction and disgust, and both grab and hold your attention in similar ways. Characters you hate keep you engaged just as much (and sometimes more) than characters you love.
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Like any addictive drug, cutting off your supply triggers a sudden drop in the release of those feel-good brain chemicals, which can leave you with a sense of sadness and a lack of energy, research shows. Experiments from the 1970s found that asking people to give up TV for a month actually triggered depression and the sense that the participants had “lost a friend.”
majeeds

Your Brain on Computers - Plugged-In Parents - NYTimes.com - 2 views

  • “There’s something that’s so engrossing about the kind of interactions people do with screens that they wall out the world,” she said. “I’ve talked to children who try to get their parents to stop texting while driving and they get resistance, ‘Oh, just one, just one more quick one, honey.’ It’s like ‘one more drink.’ ”
    • majeeds
       
      Another instance of the addiction of technology. Addiction effects the brain very negatively. 
George Neff

The Netflix effect: how binge watching is changing television | News | TechRadar - 0 views

  • The bold new era of content distribution and technological efficiency has served up entire, original award-winning series series like Netflix' House of Cards and Orange is the New Black for consumption in one sitting, if the viewer desires.
  • Quite frankly, we've never had it so good.
  • empowered the consumer.
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  • We spoke to television scholars and media psychologists on whether marathon viewing is really enhancing our experience, beyond the buffet. If we can have everything, does everything mean anything?
  • "Even a single episode has so many highs and lows that by the end of it you're so beaten up, you're less receptive to the emotional and intellectual ideas being put forth. Yet still we click and watch another one."
  • Netflix says it's more organic that way – it also means that if you don't do anything the episodes will just keep on coming.
  • With more traditional distribution models there is arguably more of an opportunity to let the experience sink in, find an appreciation and look forward to the next part of the journey.
  • "Breaking Bad has become the greatest example of the perfect show for binge viewing, he tells us. "Not only is it okay to binge view a series like that, but it is a better way to watch it.
  • you can understand the inner workings of these stories if you view them in more concentrated chunks
  • binge watching is the antithesis to how TV traditionally works.
  • Now, thanks to the advent of high-speed internet and the connected services they've enabled, technology has surpassed the content.
  • Ironically enough, the week-to-week format we enjoyed/endured during our last hours with Jesse and Walt proved to be an anomaly for millions who latched on to the growing buzz and raced through the previous five-and-half-seasons during the 12-month pre-climax hiatus – the binge before the episodic storm.
  • "I think Breaking Bad is probably as close as we're going to come to such a universal, cultural televisual event again," said film and television historian and associate professor at UCLA Jonathan Kuntz.
  • Breaking Bad, as it turned out, bridged the two eras perfectly, offering a stunning paradox of each distribution model's merits.
  • "The generation coming up now, all they're going to know is on demand. What pleasure they derive from anything will come from that,"
  • Another factor to consider in the great binge debate is that feeling of withdrawal when we run out of new episodes.
  • "The [binge viewing] experience is so good that you feel physically sad that it's over. That sense you had is more attached to it being a great artistic experience,"
  • The strength of our desire for gratification plays into a debate the psychologists call Connoisseur vs Addict. The former loves to be present in the moment, can savour the engagement and sees how everything ties into a beautiful package. The latter just needs a fix.
  • "An addict is working on a two-pronged schema, which is aspiration and completion. Aspiration is thedopamine-fuelled desire to recapture a feeling," he told TechRadar."When you get the completion, it's not about the rush, but ultimately about achieving the aspiration of the completion. When things are that accessible, what happens to the value of the product?"
marikejp

The Rise and Inglorious Fall of Myspace - Businessweek - 0 views

  • Jackson still hustles for attention on the lower rungs of fame—he currently stars in season five of Celebrity Rehab, in which he battles his addiction to growth hormones for cable television viewers.
  • this year
    • marikejp
       
      (2011)
  • "Getting people to come back to something that in their minds has become less useful is an incredible challenge on the Web—just ask AOL,"
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  • LinkedIn (LNKD) valued at $6.4 billion
  • Many Myspace pages appear to be host bodies for the worst kinds of advertising parasites. On the upper right-hand corner of the page for Zaiko Langa Langa, an African band Googled at random, a photo of a blonde in a tight T-shirt appears, asking, "Want a Girlfriend? View Hundreds of Pics HERE!"
  • Mismanagement, a flawed merger, and countless strategic blunders have accelerated Myspace's fall from being one of the most popular websites on earth—one that promised to redefine music, politics, dating, and pop culture—to an afterthought.
kinseyem

Health Education Center - General Health - 1 views

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    Unfortunately, college students can easily become addicted to the internet because of free access and lots of unstructured time. The internet allows students to easily find the most up to date resources as well as offer a great way to take a break from studies or keep in touch with friends and family.
kinseyem

Social Anxiety and the Internet: Is the Internet Helpful or a Hindrance? - 1 views

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    Eileen Bailey Health Guide Social anxiety is "an intense, persistent fear of being scruitinzed and negatively evaluated by others in social or performance situations." According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA), 15 million adults in the United States suffer from social anxiety, avoiding situations or face-to-face contact because of their fear of doing something that would cause them embarrassment.
George Neff

Ovid: External Link - 0 views

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    On the psychological effects of television
kinseyem

Youth Internet Use: Risks and Opportunities: Positive Aspects of Internet Use - 0 views

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    Risks and opportunities the internet provides with their users.
kinseyem

Meet the Mysterious Hacking Collective Who Love Trolling Anonymous | VICE United Kingdom - 0 views

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    Descriptions of different hacker organizations and what their intent is
kahn_artist

This Is How The Internet Is Rewiring Your Brain - 5 views

  • Fact #1: The Internet may give you an addict's brain.
    • majeeds
       
      Technology is addicting!
  • act #2: You may feel more lonely and jealous.
    • majeeds
       
      Another brain stressor. 
  • Fact #4: Memory problems may be more likely.
    • majeeds
       
      And here begins our ultimate problem with technology - the deterioration of brain function.
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  • Fact #5: But it's not all bad -- in moderation, the Internet can actually boost brain function.
    • majeeds
       
      Here come in brain games to boost cognitive function - technology reversing its own side effects.
    • kahn_artist
       
      That's an interesting way to look at it, as a "side effect". I am actually trying to work against that theory but all of the articles are pushing for it. Hm.
  • A 2008 study suggests that use of Internet search engines can stimulate neural activation patterns and potentially enhance brain function in older adults. "The study results are encouraging, that emerging computerized technologies may have physiological effects and potential benefits for middle-aged and older adults," the study's principal investigator, Dr. Gary Small, professor of neuroscience and human behavior at UCLA, said in a written statement. "Internet searching engages complicated brain activity, which may help exercise and improve brain function."
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    Mostly this article works against my topic, but Fact 5 could prove useful. "Use of internet search engines can stimulate neural activation patterns and potentially enhance brain function..."
marikejp

What draws us to Facebook? - 0 views

  • It can boost our self-esteem, satisfy our need for connectedness and self-promotion, and help us maintain offline relationships.
  • The sociable, the lonely and the narcissistic among us may turn to Facebook to satisfy different needs.
  • site's appeal into two areas: the need to belong and the need for self-presentation. Facebook, Hofmann says, satisfies both of those basic needs.
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  • Paradoxically, the researchers found that spending a lot of time on Facebook correlated with both high levels of feeling connected to other people and with high levels of disconnection.
  • "It's almost like an addiction that doesn't solve the thing that you're trying to cope with."
  • People who are lonely and disconnected spend time on Facebook to cope with their loneliness. But people who aren't lonely also spend time on Facebook, and for them the site helps maintain social connections, leading them to spend even more time there.
  • the students who felt particularly lonely and disconnected after their time away from Facebook reported sharply increased use of the site when they were allowed back on — presumably because the loneliness was motivating them to spend more time there.
  • we gain some psychological benefit even from passively viewing our own profiles.
  • students who were asked to look at their own Facebook page for just three minutes showed a boost in self-esteem
  • reinforces the version of ourselves who we want to be and can have a positive effect on our self-esteem.
  • people who updated their Facebook status frequently, tagged themselves often in photos and had many Facebook friends — including people whom they didn't know in real life — scored higher on a narcissistic personality inventory than people who used the site more judiciously.
  • can be useful because it can allow people to access information that they wouldn't otherwise know — such as a new job opportunity or a news story they might have missed.
  • "The concept is here to stay, because it is driven by human needs,"
symone008

Online Support Groups For Alcoholism - Sober Nation - 0 views

    • symone008
       
      - AA now have online forums - Are online forums the first step to finding face to face groups?
  • he “12 step program” designed by Alcoholics Anonymous has proven to be a tangible tool for recovery from alcohol addiction and can now be accessed and followed online with feedback from members of the online support group community. Online alcoholism rehab may not ever completely replace face-to-face counseling, including group therapy, as encountered in A.A. meetings.  However, to those who are taking an initial step toward their recovery, the flow of support and strength to be gained from coming in touch with real people at online support groups for alcoholism can be enough of a stimulus to help one make it through one more day.
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    Main article about abuse of alcohol. AA has online forums. 
marikejp

The Rise and Inglorious Fall of Myspace - Businessweek - 0 views

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    "Jackson still hustles for attention on the lower rungs of fame-he currently stars in season five of Celebrity Rehab, in which he battles his addiction to growth hormones for cable television viewers."
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