Essay Assignment (Choose One):
Option 1:
In a 1,000-word essay, typed and double-spaced, support, defend, or complicate Adam Alter’s assertion that morally dubious, entrepreneurial technocrats are imposing addictive technologies on consumers and that these technologies have deficits that far outweigh their benefits. Be sure to use the Toulmin structure in which you include a counterargument-rebuttal section before your essay’s conclusion. You must include 3 credible sources in your Works Cited page.
Option 2:
In a 1,000 word essay, typed and double-spaced, develop an argumentative thesis that explains how Adam Alter's book informs the pathologies rendered in Andrew Sullivan's online essay, "I Used to be a Human Being." Be sure to use the Toulmin structure in which you include a counterargument-rebuttal section before your essay’s conclusion. You must include 3 credible sources in your Works Cited page.
Option 3:
A crucial life lesson is that we aren’t hard-wired to get hooked to the Internet and fragment our attention with social media and smartphone addiction. To do so is to be miserable knowing we wasted our life on nonsense. In contrast, we are hard-wired to have the humility and wisdom to know our time is limited and we must manage our time wisely working hard at tasks that are meaningful to us and that require great effort than should not be diminished by social media distractions and the like. Drawing from both Cal Newport’s Deep Work and Adam Alter’s Irresistible, develop an argumentative thesis that supports the above theme. Your essay should be 1,000 words and have 3 sources for your Works Cited.
Study Questions
One. What determines successful elimination of an addiction?
We read that 95% of heroin addicts have relapses even after going through an excruciating detox.
But Vietnam vets had 95% successful addiction cessation after they returned to America because they had removed the thing that matters most:
Environment
Try all you want to stop an addiction, but once you immerse yourself in the people and places of that addiction with all the requisite triggers and you’re hooked again.
Alter points to a dramatic case study of a brilliant student Isaac who goes on a 5-week binge and ignored hundreds of phone calls before he answers his mother’s and undergoes an intervention.
He leaves his “Addict Environment,” Washington, DC, and returns to Seattle for reStart intervention. He had greasy hair, he had gained 60 pounds, he looked like a monster.
The lesson is that smart, good people, not “addictive personalities,” can become addicts if in the right environment and circumstances.
Drugs used to be the addictive substance that snared us.
But in the digital age addictive behaviors are the new danger, and addictive behaviors, generated from the internet, are everywhere, even our pocket.
Two. Why are internet-driven behavioral addictions so dangerous?
For one, the internet is everywhere. How do you avoid it?
For two, many internet behaviors result in fast feedback. Fast feedback stimulates dopamine in the brain’s pleasure center.
Remember, learn to stimulate the brain and you can take anyone and make them into an addict.
A stimulated brain produces dopamine, but then the brain quickly shuts down the dopamine to “dam the flood of euphoria.”
In the absence of euphoria, the brain becomes uneasy, restless, uncomfortable and the person is compelled to get another dopamine fix.
Repeatedly returning to the Internet for emotional, stress, and dopamine-depletion relief results in severe addiction.
Three. What malady is rising in adults?
Sleep deprivation afflicts two thirds of adults and is growing thanks to email, smartphones, and other gadgets.
Sleep deprivation is an addict’s partner, the result of “over-engagement” with a behavior or substance.
60% of adults keep their phones close when they sleep.
Screen light kills melatonin, the hormone that helps us sleep.
Four. How is addiction a form of misguided love?
We are hardwired to love. Learning to love is a survival mechanism. We find unity, connection, and loyalty through the art of loving.
We want to love. We want to experience the full immersion of losing ourselves entirely into this force greater than ourselves we call love.
When we surrender to this greater force, we experience wonderful brain sensations, including dopamine.
Addictive behavior seeks to have the same brain stimulation as someone who is deeply engaged in this power we call love.
In the absence of real love, we seek substitutes: We seek Facebook friends, Instagram followers, and we have an insatiable appetite for likes and comments. We became addicted to this social media matrix, but we do not find love.
We find anxiety and depression, and of course, we find ourselves addicted.
Five. Why was Stanton Peele marginalized for so many decades by the scientific community?
Contrary to Alcoholics Anonymous and other organizations, Peele didn’t believe addiction was a disease, an orthodox belief of many treatment programs.
Nor did he believe addiction required complete abstinence.
Instead, Peele believed addiction is the association between an unfulfilled psychological need and a set of actions that assuage or cure that need in the short-term but that have destructive long-term consequences.
After four decades, Peele’s addiction model has slowly gained credibility in the mainstream.
Six. How does an addict suffer from a divided soul?
An addict can hate his addiction intellectually because he can understand how the addiction is destroying him. He can hate his dependence on constantly going one Facebook, for example. But here’s the split: His brain still craves Facebook. Social media sites are feeding his brain something his brain craves. And yet he knows social media is his devil, if you will, his source of self-destruction. He’s divided.
My brain knows that chocolate cake, the huge slices I crave, are bad for my weight control, but my brain craves the dopamine explosion provided by chocolate cake.
Seven. Why does goal-setting in the social media age lead to emptiness and despair?
We are never good enough. We can never project the “hologram of the superpowered self” (to take language from Kristen Dombek in her essay “Emptiness”) to our ideal of perfection.
We are encouraged to partake in a sort of megalomaniacal narcissism, which leaves us emptier and emptier even as our avatar self wallows in an attention bath of thousands of likes and followers.
In the past, having goals was about survival.
But now goal-setting is an artificially-created ego device.
The goal of reaching 5,000 followers is more important than reaching 5,000 followers because in world of social media addiction we have to stay distracted and always be pushing ourselves.
“Wearable tech” has exacerbated our obsession with goals. We must reach 10,000 steps a day; we must have at least 10,000 “engagements” on Twitter and at least 10,000 followers.
After a Facebook post, we need at least 100 likes within an hour or else our self-worth will not have been validated sufficiently and we will send the rest of the day sullen and pouting.
We must chronicle our “journey” from having a “fatty belly” to having a “six pack” with video posts on Facebook or YouTube and gain thousands of followers in the process.
We must unbox yet another piece of gaudy jewelry or some newfangled tech device so that our subscribers can drool and burst in violent paroxysms resulting in yet thousands of more likes and comments so we can wallow in our sense of relevance and validation.
We have smartphone apps that can count calories when we photograph our meals and then these calorie counts can be posted on dozens of social media sites so we can be lavished with praise for our outstanding dietary discipline and fortitude, which will result in more likes and followers.
This self-obsession contributes to narcissism, which results in disconnection from one another.
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