According to Susanne Reed, PhD (Addiction Center), “Internet addiction is a broad term for several unhealthy behaviors related to spending too much time online. The behaviors become an addiction when someone cannot quit their online activities despite them causing negative consequences.”
Identified are six main types: porn and cybersex, social media, gaming, online relationships, compulsive information seeking, and online compulsions such as shopping and gambling.
Why has internet addiction become such a common global problem? Adam Alter‘s Irresistible:The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked (2017) states, “The environment and circumstance of the digital age are far more conducive to addiction than anything humans have experienced in our history.” This is because “our actions are being guided less by our own volition than by the architecture of the technologies we use.” Furthermore, “Addictive tech is part of the mainstream in a way that addictive substances never will be.”
Let’s look at some info about each of the six lures listed above.
- Porn: When sex addiction expert Robert Weiss posted about “The Evolution of Pornography,” going back to prehistory (Psychology Today), it was noted that from 1991 to 2004, there was a huge change: “home internet became a thing, and, with that, our ability to affordably and anonymously access pornography changed forever. Photos and videos catering to every imaginable sexual taste and fetish were readily available for anonymous viewing. This porn proliferation was so ubiquitous that it crossed over into pop culture.”
- Social Media: In Kim Stolz‘s 2014 Unfriending My Ex: And Other Things I’ll Never Do, a main focus was that she gave up her tech-focused ways for a whole week! Publishers Weekly summarized the results: “…(S)he investigates and considers the various effects of society’s (and particularly her generation’s) dependency upon technology, finding that texting and smartphones allow chatting without relationship-building, loneliness in spite of keeping in touch, and increased anxiety. She also finds that Facebook fosters jealousy, spying, and virtual affairs, and links the addiction to ADHD…” At the time her insights were considered groundbreaking. Now it seems that we just accept social media addiction as a common norm.
- Gaming: “Many popular video games are intentionally designed to be habit-forming. Psychologists at major game studios frequently replicate strategies from the gambling and retail industries to ensure that players keep coming back,” reports Andrew Fishman, LCSW, Psychology Today.
- Online Relationships: “Dating apps can feel addictive because they activate the dopamine reward system”(The Conversation). The site Better Help advises how to know if you’re addicted to chat rooms and what you can do about it. And Healthy Place reports, “Online affairs account for a growing number of divorce cases and it is the most frequently treated problem at the Center for Online Addiction.”
- Compulsive Information Seeking: Per Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous, “Information addiction is a compulsive or unhealthy relationship to researching and consuming information. This can include an addiction to the news, online shopping, AI chatbots, online encyclopedias, compulsive online research such as product or health research, obsessively organizing or hoarding data (via notes, lists, bookmarks etc), constantly checking our phones, emails, or social media accounts for new activity, always listening to podcasts and radio, compulsively searching any question we are curious about, and other similar behaviors.”
- Online Compulsions: Example from Emma Marris, Nature. “From China to Brazil to Germany, huge numbers of people are addicted to shopping, driven in part by companies that use gaming strategies.”
The Internet Addiction Test was developed by psychologist Dr. Kimberly Young (1965-2019), expert in this field. Click on the link if you’re concerned about your own online activity.
