Internet Addiction

i'm sure amtrak in the US will have wifi eventually, and may well have it on certain lines already. but not on the trains i've been on over the past few years.

this is gonna sound a little silly and old-man op ed-ish perhaps, but im starting to think that boredom, like *real* boredom, like the kind of boredom i spent most of my childhood trying to figure a way out of, doesn't exist anymore? or that the kind of boredom we experience now is qualitatively different now, more manic or repetitive boredom, refreshing websites and the like, rather than the kind that would actually get you to leave your house or go kick a tire or something. and i wonder if, on some level, you need to cultivate a little boredom to re-train or re-construct an ability to focus or even take pleasure in things that are not so immediately grasped in a short stimulus-reward cycle.

I've thought the same thing many times. Although sometimes I wonder if my life feeling "filled up" with worries might just be a function of adulthood. But then again, the sense I have of having "no relief" is probably at least in part due to spending all my free moments engaged in, as you said, "manic repetitive behaviors." This feeling of emptiness and disenchantment -- exhaustion -- is a kind of boredom, but it's not the kind that makes the says seem endless.

Yes, the boredom thing is a huge deal. I am approaching this as a parent now* because I have very little kids and this stuff is only going to get exponentially more relevant and pressing and crazy as they grow up. A lot of what I've read about raising children stresses the importance of boredom to help them develop their coping mechanisms, just like ryan said.

This shit genuinely worries me because if internet 'addiction' or pervasiveness etc affects me, an adult who is the latest of late adopters and has no particular love for tech and gadgets etc, then what chance do my teeny innocent kids have at growing up without it affecting their development? The formation of their senses of self, their habits, everything. My 3 year old is already OBSESSED with phones, tablets, computers, any type of gaming shit. And we make a conscious effort to limit it in our home. But most families we know in this area have tablets, DSes, whatever, and let their toddlers have them whenever they want. My son has, at a playground, as I ran after him while carrying my smaller son, followed and tried to get in the car with a family we'd never met before because one of their kids had an iPod and was letting my son look at it. I had to drag him out of this family's car crying. What chance do they have when these devices seem that enticing and literally everyone else is always using them, everywhere?

*although it can and does apply to my own life too

ryan: looks like there is some research confirming the phenomenon you described of people forgetting how to cope with ordinary boredom, and subsequently experiencing a more insidious, boundary-less type of boredom all the time

This aligns with research conducted earlier this year by John Eastwood and his colleagues at York University in a meta-analysis of boredom. What causes us to feel bored and, as a result, unhappy? Attention. When our attention is actively engaged, we aren’t bored; when we fail to engage, boredom sets in. As Eastwood’s work, along with recent research on media multitasking, have illustrated, the greater the number of things we have pulling at our attention, the less we are able to meaningfully engage, and the more discontented we become.

In other words, the world of constant connectivity and media, as embodied by Facebook, is the social network’s worst enemy: in every study that distinguished the two types of Facebook experiences—active versus passive—people spent, on average, far more time passively scrolling through newsfeeds than they did actively engaging with content. This may be why general studies of overall Facebook use, like Kross’s of Ann Arbor residents, so often show deleterious effects on our emotional state. Demands on our attention lead us to use Facebook more passively than actively, and passive experiences, no matter the medium, translate to feelings of disconnection and boredom.

In ongoing research, the psychologist Timothy Wilson has learned, as he put it to me, that college students start going “crazy” after just a few minutes in a room without their phones or a computer. “One would think we could spend the time mentally entertaining ourselves,” he said. “But we can’t. We’ve forgotten how.” Whenever we have downtime, the Internet is an enticing, quick solution that immediately fills the gap. We get bored, look at Facebook or Twitter, and become more bored. Getting rid of Facebook wouldn’t change the fact that our attention is, more and more frequently, forgetting the path to proper, fulfilling engagement. And in that sense, Facebook isn’t the problem. It’s the symptom.

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-facebook-makes-us-unhappy

thanks for posting that!

been trying to get back into a daily meditation practice but honestly just getting nowhere. I wonder if that's too much too fast. gonna let myself just be "bored" for 20 mins a day first.

this is good

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/fear-of-screens/

For as long as there have been social media and mobile devices, there have also been articles or books aimed at lay audiences arguing that we’re trading real life for something digital. And then come the replies from researchers who have found that the relationship is much more complicated — that people who text more often also meet face to face more; that the contemporary technologies of social isolation were, and are, the television and the automobile, not smart phones; that there’s been a recent reversal of the long post–World War II trend toward social isolation.

Her digital dualism is plain when she describes how we have “used technology to create a second nature, an artificial nature,” or when she discusses a “world of screens,” or when she laments “the pull of the online world” away from the real world of humans. “We turn to our phones instead of each other,” she says, as though our phones do not contain each other. She worries that online, “we are tempted to present ourselves as we would like to be,” as if such virtuality and self-presentation hasn’t always been basic to the traditional “real” world of human bodies. Digital dualism allows Turkle to write as though she is championing humanity, conversation, and empathy when ultimately she is merely privileging geography.

There is another way we can handle our phones, one that doesn’t call for a misguided “mindfulness” that misperceives technology as inherently toxic: Don’t be rude to others, with or without your phone. Be mindful of people rather than screens. Focus less on your relationship to your device and more on your relationship to human beings. This includes not feeling entitled to someone’s attention just because they are geographically near, and it especially includes not putting forward your nonuse of a phone as proof of your superiority and others’ subhumanity.

ok but this:

“we are tempted to present ourselves as we would like to be,” as if such virtuality and self-presentation hasn’t always been basic to the traditional “real” world of human bodies."

is a bit odd. as presenting yourself in person how you want to be is inevitably limited somewhat by you being there in person, even if you are great at presenting a particularly good version of yourself. whereas presenting yourself as you would like to appear online is a hell of a lot easier.

you can't possibly have read and digested the article in that time

you must have only skimmed it

i bet you skimmed it on your phone

society is in the gutter

but yes i think the 'nothing has qualitatively changed' aspect of that particular argument is dubious

reality privileges geography

This includes not feeling entitled to someone’s attention just because they are geographically near

I'm on board with most of that quote, but not this. If I've cleared my schedule, gotten on my bike or in my car, and met you for dinner or a coffee, then yes, I have more claim on your attention than the stuff on your phone you can check any old time.

Turkle’s claims may feel commonsensical in part because they are self-flattering: They let us suspect that we are the last humans standing in a world of dehumanized phone-toting drones.

This feels like a strawman to me -- I think a lot of the people who find anti-screen arguments compelling are people who feel their own relationships harmed by them, their own ability to focus diminished, etc. Or maybe I'm projecting.

"in part"

great quote caek, thanks. gonna send the article to my mom

personally my internet addiction is different from what seems to be being described in that piece, which sounds more like a rational reaction to the extension by technology into new social spaces. my addiction is definitely irrational, in the following sense. if I have an hour to kill, at each successive individual moment I will choose to be on the Internet, thinking that 'that's ok, if I am choosing to do it this must be the thing that I most want to do'. but then invariably by the end of the hour I feel a dread and regret hour long sum-of-instants choice. happens frequently enough that I should rationally choose to not spend my spare hours on the Internet, or at least not the full hour, yet I never learn the lesson. kind of a simplified explanation because I also do love the Internet and cherish my time on it, but I thin k you get the idea. it's like a breakdown between my inter temporal choices. and smart phones, social media have aggravated that tendency (for me)

phartsmones have made it acceptable to read stuff while engaging in pedestrianism. Before, if you walked from place to place with your nose stuffed in a book or a magazine or a ream of correspondence, you were a weirdo. now it's like, hey man, I'm blowing up pigs / checking my map coordinates / fantasy balling, or maybe I am reading up on nerd shit and crushing my inbox, what's it to you? It's totally a better world.

I read this thread during a period when I was self banned from ilx and I wanted to say, at the time, that all the posters itt are people whom I have learned a huge amount from and love reading on a regular basis. so, while I hope you all success in your attempts at conquering your internet addictions, your addictions are creating some kind of positive externality that myself (and many others) are benefitting from! so I also hope you don't :-P

phartsmones have made it acceptable to read stuff while engaging in pedestrianism. Before, if you walked from place to place with your nose stuffed in a book or a magazine or a ream of correspondence, you were a weirdo. now it's like, hey man, I'm blowing up pigs / checking my map coordinates / fantasy balling, or maybe I am reading up on nerd shit and crushing my inbox, what's it to you? It's totally a better world.

yeah totally this too

social media makes it easier for shy people (hi) to meet people while travelling or when moving to a different city. never been a 'just show up at the bar alone and make friends' type

i deleted twitter on my phone, and while i can still read ILX on it i cant post because i forgot my password and so cant login. not posting = less obsessive checking to see if anyone responded to you.

both have been positive. i really miss twitter sometimes. the only time killer on my phone is, uh, instagram, which is probably the least addictive of all the social media platforms.

sometimes it occurs to me that, for surely the first time in history, to expose yourself to mere presence (ie, doing nothing) is somehow a deliberate choice only, not something you can expect to endure on a regular basis, and i wonder if pre-internet pre-smartphone civilization will appear as strange and foreign to the future as, say, pre-modern civilization does to us now.

I suppose compulsively expressing my opinion about everything is an evolutionary step forward from compulsively pumping quarters into Medieval Madness pinball in the student center.

really vehemently disagree with that (nothing directed toward you personally), sound-off culture is the worst (umm...)

What Rip Van Wanko's Post About Sound-Off Culture Gets Wrong

internet addiction isn't only about sounding off. not everyone wants to use it to broadcast their opinions publicly. in fact i suspect most do not and it's just a loud dumb minority who give it the impression of a vox populi. that stat where like .01% of twitter users are responsible for 99.99% of the tweets. i was deeply addicted before ever reading forums, before social media. msn messenger, chat rooms, just reading stuff. the smartphone stuff just let's you do that everywhere anytime

i like to read

i miss the good internet so much

i miss the earth so much, i miss my wife

downloaded stayfocused plug-in for chrome and had the most productive monday morning at work in months

that looks like something I need

yea i could use that too

i need a meta stayfocusd plug-in that forces me to downlaod stayfocusd and use it

how are you gonna download the plug-in for the plug-in though huh

stay what now?

i need a meta stayfocusd plug-in that forces me to downlaod stayfocusd and use it

― Karl Malone, Monday, March 7, 2016 11:41 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTMFM. Just like I need a planner to remind me to use and check a planner.

I need a brain that functions properly, is what I'm saying here.

i need someone to tell me to work, to make sure that my work-enhancing plug-ins are downloaded and operational, and also to do my work for me

I need someone who will do my work and perform all of my daily non-work routines for me and also continually tell me that my inability to do all of the things they're doing for me doesn't make me a bad person.

So that I can spend all day on the internet.

i wonder if the womb has wi-fi

I like stayfocused but the problems is I also have explorer on my work computer

LOL @ how hard i rocked it at work today, i truly just thought i was an inherently unproductive person before today. also how many times i mindlessly typed ilxor.com, twitter.com or facebook.com into my browser only to be shut out

us elections feed my internet addiction like nothing else and the high suspense of the GOP primaries + leftist infighting (a guilty pleasure of mine) caused by sanders running in the dem primary have just been destroying my work ethic

willpower to install/turn it on is negligible. you can also customize it to give you a maximum of say, 15 or 30 daily minutes across all banned sites. also part of the problem for me is not just the act of procrastinating, but procrastinating from procrastinating? like, i frequently open some relatively longformish article, skim the first paragraph, feel bored and agitated, then go back to twitter/ilx. i used my fifteen minutes on social media to open a nice wax poetics piece on Ron Hardy and some election stuff that i then actually read pretty thoroughly

you need willpower to stay off other browsers but that's easier than you'd think. the shame of stupidity of sneaking past a trap you set yourself worked well for day one at least

elections are a great example of the anxiety thing I talked about upthread -- it feels like it's this PROBLEM that you need to SOLVE. But you can't!

the anxiety about open-ended stuff without goals or resolutions I mean.

anyone tried just not using the internet for anything outside of work for an extended period of time, if so how did it work out

worked out pretty great but eventually i got bored. :(

increasingly i am feeling like i wasn't built for this. there is an open-endedness to browsing the internet that makes it feel different than reading books or whatever and way more addictive.

yeah you should definitely take a break if you can. just try to keep yourself intellectually stimulated- that's always the challenge for me.

i think a good goal would be to learn how to live with boredom. it shouldn't feel so intolerable to sit with myself without stimulation... idk.

i tried looking up testimonials from people who have tried living without the internet but i can't find all that much. makes sense, i guess.. people who unplugged wouldn't by definition be on the internet... but i was still surprised. i would think more people would be interested in the idea of unplugging.

embracing boredom is key. you are a smart guy, imagine the interesting thoughts you'll have once you get past that initial boredom.

the weird irony of constant connectivity is that while it promises to maximize productivity (which is bad enough) never in history has there been something so good at entrapping you into wasting time.