{"id":3770,"date":"2012-04-24T10:23:44","date_gmt":"2012-04-24T17:23:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/drjimtaylor.com\/2.0\/?p=3770"},"modified":"2012-04-24T10:23:44","modified_gmt":"2012-04-24T17:23:44","slug":"technology-is-technology-the-new-opiate-of-the-masses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/technology-is-technology-the-new-opiate-of-the-masses\/","title":{"rendered":"Technology: Is Technology the New Opiate of the Masses?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Karl Marx famously called religion the \u201copiate of the masses.\u201d Well, to paraphrase Reggie Hammond, Eddie Murphy\u2019s character in the film 48 Hours<\/em>, \u201cThere\u2019s a new opiate in town and its name is technology.\u201d Yes, folks, everywhere you look these days, you see people \u201cshooting up\u201d their technological \u201cdrug\u201d of choice, whether emails, text messages, Twitter or Facebook feeds, YouTube videos, streaming movies and TV shows, or playing app games on their smartphones.<\/p>\n

Concerns about this \u201cdrug\u201d have been gaining increasing attention in recent years. The words Internet and addiction have become conjoined and are now a part of our technology lexicon (usually by people who say it dismissively with a smirk as they ingest this drug through their favorite delivery system, whether computer, tablet, or smartphone). A 2010 survey<\/a> found that 61% of Americans (the number is higher among young people) say they are addicted to the Internet. Another survey<\/a> reported that \u201caddicted\u201d was the word most commonly used by people to describe their relationship to technology. Treatment programs for Internet addiction have been springing up all over the U.S. (this despite the fact that the American Psychiatric Association decided that it wasn\u2019t worthy of being designated a formal type of mental illness).<\/p>\n

The realization that technology is the new opiate of the masses reached a new high (pun intended) when the New York Times Magazine<\/em> featured an article by Sam Anderson<\/a> titled (chillingly), \u201cThe Hyperaddictive, Time-Sucking, Relationship-Busting, Mind-Crushing Power and Allure of Silly Digital Games.\u201d In this article, Mr. Anderson connects the use of what he calls \u201cstupid games\u201d (I don\u2019t think the quotation marks are necessary; the phrase speaks for itself) with terms such as addiction, OCD, and self-destruction. The game designer Frank Lantz likens these games to heroin and has the audacity to see both as \u201cthis transcendently beautiful and cerebral thing.\u201d Not an apt metaphor in either case, I’m sure heroin addicts would agree.<\/p>\n

His critique is compounded by what is commonly referred to as \u201cgamification,\u201d in which corporations are increasingly using technology as a means of \u201chooking\u201d customers on their products.<\/p>\n

Yet, somehow, Mr. Anderson concludes that these games are, well, just games, in other words, harmless fun.<\/p>\n

The addictive quality of technology appears to go deeper than just psychological dependence. There is emerging evidence<\/a> indicating that our interaction with technology produces the same neurochemical reaction\u2014a burst of dopamine\u2014as that from alcohol, drugs, sex, and gambling. Persistent exposure to technology-related cues, such as the vibration from a smartphone announcing the arrival of a new text message or the ping of an incoming tweet, can cause people to get caught in a vicious cycle of dopamine stimulation and deprivation. Moreover, the brevity of technology, such as 140-character text messages, lends itself to this vicious cycle because the information received isn\u2019t completely satisfying, so people are driven to seek out more information for their next shot of dopamine. Not surprisingly, one study<\/a> found that people had a harder time resisting the allure of social media than they did for sex, sleep, cigarettes, and alcohol.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, unlike drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes, being hooked on technology doesn\u2019t pose any immediate risks to users, so perhaps we should say, \u201cNo harm, no foul.\u201d Heck, I’m not against some mindless entertainment. This is America and, as a free country, we all have a right to \u201cpick our poison\u201d and spend our time however we wish.<\/p>\n

At the same time, there is a difference between temporary diversions, sustained obsessions, and uncontrollable addictions. Americans spend an average of five hours a day on line and young people more than 7.5 hours in front of a screen. Moreover, it has been estimated that people worldwide spend over three million hours playing Angry Birds every day. This is not just idle time either; this degree of absorption in technology incurs massive opportunity costs in terms of time, money, relationships, and meaningful experiences.<\/p>\n

Mr. Anderson concludes with the notion that technology forces \u201cus to make a series of interesting choices about what matters, moment to moment, in our lives.\u201d Yet, from his description of his experience with technology as \u201chyper-addictive, time-sucking, relationship-busting, mind-crushing,\u201d there doesn’t seem to be any choice at all; that\u2019s called an addiction. And, if there are choices, for example, whether to set limits and use time more wisely, they don’t speak well of the hundreds of millions of people who decide that these games are a good use of their time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Karl Marx famously called religion the \u201copiate of the masses.\u201d Well, to paraphrase Reggie Hammond, Eddie Murphy\u2019s character in the film 48 Hours, \u201cThere\u2019s a new opiate in town and its name is technology.\u201d Yes, folks, everywhere you look these days, you see people \u201cshooting up\u201d their technological \u201cdrug\u201d of choice, whether emails, text messages, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1526],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3770\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}