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.
Chinese Boot Camp for Game Addiction
"The Real Reason You Are Addicted to Farmville"
"What Facebook Addiction Looks Like in the Brain"
"The Science Behind Why Facebook Is So Addictive"
Study Questions
One. How long would you stay on Facebook or any other social media site if your posts were ignored?
These social media sites would die except that they give feedback. For example, one of the most popular sites, Reddit, uses up and down arrows to show approval or condemnation of posts.
Feedback is a reward system that stimulates the brain.
Social media works in part because of what we might call the Mutual Sycophant Club: I scratch your back and you scratch my back. We like each other’s posts, no matter how insipid, unremarkable, and mediocre, in order to fuel the feedback loop.
Getting caught up in this loop is a huge time suck, a huge distraction, a huge waste, and a huge diversion from meaningful pursuits. But its draw is peer pressure and the tyranny of Technology: Don’t live in the common currency of technology and be irrelevant, invisible, and essentially dead.
It takes a lot of courage to live off the grid.
Many people cannot do it. They are so dependent on the sense of community, however fake, that they derive from their social media accounts. To delete their accounts would result in a feeling of terrifying, primal aloneness, for which there is no word in English. We have to look to German:
Mutterseelinallein: complete abandonment, the sense that your mother's soul has left you.
People with tattered, undeveloped, needy selves will be too scared to go off the grid because they will become possessed by the terror of mutterseelinallein.
Feedback Loop Can Be Explained by Pigeon Experiments
In 1971, researcher Michael Zeiler did pigeon experiments in which he found they pecked more ravenously when their pellet rewards were inconsistently given because the inconsistency was analogous to gambling’s dopamine effects.
Decades later, Facebook did an experiment with a “like” button, the first of its kind on the Internet, and the “like” button had the effect of crack cocaine. It was a game-changer. Suddenly Facebook grew exponentially, not just in users, but in the amount of time users spent on Facebook.
Getting “likes” was like gambling. Your uploaded photo might win a lucky strike or it might be a dud, but when you got a “full house,” as it were, you received a huge dopamine hit.
Facebook users got addicted. They experienced euphoria when they enjoyed a hailstorm of “likes”; they experienced shame and anguish when their posts were ignored or not liked.
Think about it: Adults with higher degrees of education, with high-ranking jobs, with family responsibilities were sitting at their computers in their robes drinking their green Matcha tea or eating their Hot Pockets while obsessing over their Facebook ranking. They had been reduced to experimental pigeons. They had become needy and pathetic.
But here’s the thing: Users were on Facebook LONGER than before. And that’s the point. Website creators want you on their site, the longer the better. They need to find ways to get you hooked. They don’t like you. They don’t respect you. They look at you as a potential addict, and they’re the pusher.
They actually look at you as a dumb rat or a dumb pigeon. They are rich, and they are laughing at us.
In fact, Mark Zuckerberg is on record for having said that “trusting Facebook users are dumb *****.”
Two. What is the Human Self-Inflicted Distraction Principle?
Studies show that humans can’t sit still. They can’t be alone with their thoughts. They settle into a life of easy because, ironically, settling into the good life, a life full of comfort and non-conflict, drives people crazy.
People will induce their own problems out of nothing, they will create new challenges, they will sink into a hole, just so they can create a solution to a problem that never had to exist in the first place.
Rich movie stars do nose dives into self-destruction, we are told, because the thrill of success can’t be enjoyed unless interrupted by challenge.
In other words, we’re incurably stupid.
We operate on the Self-Inflicted Distraction Principle.
The drug pushers of the Internet know this all too well.
The makers of games know this all too well.
Tetris and World of Warcraft are built for people who need constant challenge and distraction.
People are addicted to setting never-ending goals to avoid being still.
Karoshi
They play games, try to improve their social media status, wear fitness watches, take their work home on laptops to “get ahead of the curve,” and the final summation of this never-ending treadmill is the Japanese term karoshi—“death from overworking.”
Getting on the Internet treadmill becomes a neurosis and a disease. People lose their essential self, and they don’t know it because it feels normal.
Three. What is the Zeigarnik Effect?
Incomplete experiences occupy our minds and stay in our memories more than completed ones.
This is analogous to a cliff hanger for a TV show. If it ends on a cliff hanger, we are more likely to become obsessed and watch subsequent shows.
Cliff hangers can create compulsive binge-watching.
“Post-play” maximizes the cliff hanger principle. Breaking Bad from Netflix becomes a 13-hour nonstop movie punctuated with cliff hangers.
The Assist
The Netflix binge became a phenomenon, and the binge works because in addition to cliff hangers, Netflix has your programming defaulted so that if you do nothing but just sit in front of the screen the next episode will begin automatically. This is called an “assist” in the industry.
Four. What is the “bad is stronger than good” principle?
No matter how good the reviews on Yelp, Amazon, and Rate My Professor, it’s the bad reviews that stick out and have the biggest influence on people.
This principle applies to social media. You may get lots of good feedback on your channel, but it’s the mean ones that punch you in the gut and make you forget the positive feedback.
Always wanting to overcome negative feedback with greater and greater positive feedback feeds social media addiction.
Five. Why are children more vulnerable to Internet addiction than adults?
Children don’t have the natural boundaries that mature people have.
And just as dangerous, if we let children do easy things like using the Internet at the expense of more difficult albeit rewarding things like reading books, we deprive children of an important principle: Hardship inoculation.
The younger we experience tough tasks and learn how to overcome their difficulty the more we will embrace meaningful, challenging tasks later in life. For example, we may be tragically raising a generation of non-book readers.
Six. What is gamification?
Gamification is taking a non-game experience like fitness, nutrition, or social media abstinence, and turning it into a game with points and opportunities to beat personal records and so on.
Alter writes: “Gamification is a powerful business tool and if harnessed appropriately it also drives happier, healthier, and wiser behavior. “
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