Tech High
The Internet is down right now.
I know this because my connection to the Net is a critical part of my job. I look up information and compile it into poignant, thought-provoking, entertaining, easy-to-read stories. And then I go home. Or maybe to a movie, if I'm working overtime.
It's harder than it sounds. Really.
The point is that when the Internet is down, I can't look up valuable information (check e-mail). It makes me less productive (cranky). Which only goes to show that I need a smartphone on which to do research (watch YouTube videos) when my computer gets balky.
Like it is right now.
Am I addicted to the Internet, you ask? No way. If my editor told me I could start simply making my stories up, I would have no need for the Internet, and I'd quit using it immediately. (Later. Sometime. Maybe.)
Now that you know I don't have a problem, we can talk about the real issue: you. Because there's a growing sense that people (other people) can literally get hooked on the Internet and the various forms of technology it has spawned.
The Straight Dope(amine)
When it comes to whiz-bang techno gizmos, our brains are top of the line. People make a big deal about how the brainiest supercomputers can beat the smartest humans in chess these days. But could such a computer still checkmate me in eight moves if it was at the same time thinking about its kids and planning dinner and taking care of that nagging itch behind its third USB port and a thousand other little things? I think not.
Huge chunks of our brains are programmed to perform two basic tasks: analyze the world around us and enjoy said world. They are jobs so overwhelming that even that Skynet machine that takes over everything in The Terminator movies would seize up from the pressure. Both of these tasks have pretty tangible benefits. Processing information effectively allows us to better navigate our environs, be they savage savannahs or cutthroat corporations. And the fact that we enjoy food and sex helps ensure we'll survive and propagate.
But there's a third thing at work, too—our urge to achieve. We're not built to just enjoy the good things that happen to fall into our cart paths: We actively seek them out, be it a promotion, a rare 1917 penny or the best cheeseburger in town. We go on little quests for satisfaction every day, whether we know it or not. And while the goal of these quests is to sate whatever "need" we seem to have at the moment, the quest itself prompts the release of chemicals (called dopamine) into our bodies that accentuate the pleasure of it.
Because of that, the process of "wanting" something is often more stimulating than actually getting it—which perhaps explains why so many of those Christmas gifts you begged for as a kid never quite measured up once the wrapping was torn off.
Dopamine is critical to our survival. As Slate's Emily Yoffe reports, rats that have lost their dopamine receptors eventually starve to death because they lose the will to eat—even if the food is right under their little rat whiskers.
But it's also the primary ingredient for many of our addictions. "Addicts become obsessively driven to seek the reward, even as the reward itself becomes progressively less rewarding once obtained," Yoffe observes.
I Can't Click No Satisfaction
That I want to check my e-mail every five minutes or so is my dopamine talking, then.
Do I get "high" from reading the latest office memo or watching an inane (mesmerizing) YouTube clip? Well, no, not really. But remember that our brains are built to gather information—lots of it. It's not the e-mail itself that's so enticing, it's the act of incorporating new information in your noggin.
"[Neuroscientist Jaak] Panksepp says the dopamine system is activated by finding something unexpected or by the anticipation of something new," writes Yoffe. "If the rewards come unpredictably—as e-mail, texts, updates do—we get even more carried away."
This quest for novel information can send us barreling headlong into the endless Internet, getting caught in a World Wide Web of fascinating flotsam. One interesting site leads to another and another and another and, before you know it, term paper research devolves into watching Muppets sing Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody." (Click here if that sounds fun at this point.)
The Internet is history's most effective catalyst for dopamine production, and tech types know it. Many of them are, as we speak, creating devices, games and pastimes that are designed to get our dopamine pumping. They want their products to be, on some level, "addictive."
"That's the main goal you have when you design a game," Jason Kapalka, founder of the online game company PopCap, admitted to msnbc.com.
The result? PopCap's simple game Bejeweled and its successor, Bejeweled II, have generated more than $300 million for the company, according to Wired, and users have spent more than 6 billion hours playing them. Meanwhile, Zynga, the entity behind such booming Facebook games as FarmVille and Mafia Wars, employs a behavioral psychologist to help tweak their games to make them ever more involving, according to Time.
Just Give Me Five More Minutes …
The big dog in the world of online gaming is unquestionably Blizzard, the developer responsible for World of Warcraft. More than 11.5 million people play what has affectionately become known as WoW, and many enjoy the game in moderation. But WoW's tempting alchemy of timely rewards, blood-pumping challenges and social interaction sometimes entices players to spend 40 hours a week or more within its virtual world.
USA Today reports that even iPhone app games can be addictive. "I usually play [the iPhone's Shake & Spell] before I even get out of bed," says Beth Atkins. "I play every day."
And we've yet to discuss the devices themselves. Some people sleep with their iPhones and take them into the bathroom so they can respond to beckoning beeps and chirps even while in the shower. CNN reports that when BlackBerries—called "CrackBerries" by fans and foes alike—were rendered useless for 11 hours in April 2009, hospital administrator Paul Levy blogged that his hospital had to set up a crisis center.
"Cases of withdrawal were handled … with a minimal use of antidepressant drugs," he quipped.
Marc Andressen, co-founder of the revolutionary Web browser Netscape, told Time's Josh Quittner that from now on he was "only investing in dopamine companies"—companies like BlackBerry that chemically compel folks to use their products. Quittner says he was half joking. Sorta.
For now, most people are inclined to joke about Internet and tech addiction. The compulsion to check e-mail or plant a few more crops in FarmVille is akin, for most of us, to having a sudden craving for a Butterfinger—not a sudden drive to down methamphetamines.
But will we still be giggling five years from now? Or fifty? After all, our forebears used to laugh at the town drunk in those 1930s and '40s movies before we truly understood the tragic seriousness of alcoholism.
I Can Stop Any Ol' Time
World of Warcraft is, fairly or no, tech addiction's first bogeyman. Reports cross the Internet weekly of people who've lost their jobs or flunked out of school because they were playing the game too much. There are online support groups for "Warcraft widows." And, not too long ago, a 28-year-old man from Beijing reportedly died after playing WoW for several days without a break.
"Some people go for a drink at the pub or do whatever, take drugs," Steven, a former WoW player, told the Canberra Times in Australia. "I don't think this is any different. You just get in there and you just play and forget about what you have to do and stresses because you're in the game."
But WoW is far from the only game or device that can become problematic. One needs only to see someone compulsively check their BlackBerry every three minutes in a movie theater, or tap out a text during Thanksgiving dinner, to see that.
Scientists disagree with what behavior, exactly, classifies as addiction, and not everyone's convinced that people can be, technically, addicted to tech. But that hasn't stopped a handful of Internet addiction centers from springing up around the world. And, even if it's not clinically an addiction, it can bear so many hallmarks of it that, for the layman, definitions scarcely matter.
"You are looking for someone who is preoccupied with the Internet, hides or lies about their behavior, shows an inability to control their use, uses the Internet as a form of psychological escape, and continues to engage in the behavior despite the problems that it causes in one's life," says clinical psychologist Kimberly Young, founder of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery in Bradford, Penn., and author of Caught in the Net.
And, yeah, I found that quote on the Internet. Which is back up now.
Whew.