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.
"Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?"
"Microfame Game" from New York Magazine
Microfame Rules for Success
One. Self-publish on a blog or YouTube or Instagram or all of the above.
Two. Stylize to set yourself apart. Sitting at a desk or just being a talking head isn't going to cut it. You need to have some kind of schtick.
Three. Overshare: Share everything you do in life with images, vlogs, diary entries, weight-loss journeys: upload "fauxparazzi" photos, which are "non-famous" photos of yourself curated to look as if you are famous.
Four. Respond to your fans, and that means all of them. Happy fans means more subscribers.
Five. Find alliances in the social media community to promote your brand. You will promote their brand as well and live in a mutual kiss-butt society.
Six. Diversify: The more things you can do the better so you can achieve what's called "multichannel distribution" like Tila Tequila.
Seven. Create phony controversy, get into phony disagreements with other YouTubers and the like. Be contrarian and provocative for their own sake.
Eight. Persist in order to stay relevant.
Does all this sound fun to you?
Remember, millions of people are addicted to the goal-setting embedded in the above 8-Point System for Microfame.
Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants
“I Need to Check My Email”
We have developed a “check-in” habit for email, Twitter, Facebook, and other forms of media based on our hard-wiring.
John Watson, a psychologist-turned-advertising-executive, knows we have no free will based on his knowledge of the B.F. Skinner experiments.
Watson knew we could be conditioned through rewards and punishments like B.F. Skinner’s pigeons. We were no different than birds.
We could be conditioned to “peck at little buttons to receive our little snacks.”
We are motivated most effectively by “variable reinforcement,” not knowing for sure if the email or Facebook post will render rewards, but hopeful that it will.
This constant hopeful state is what keeps us addicted to the routine of checking emails and other websites.
The Rise of Facebook
In 2004, Facebook spread across American campuses and it was reported that students skipped classes and stopped doing their homework to be on Facebook.
The appeal was many:
“Augmented representation of self”
One could “constantly refine one’s profile” and “marvel at one’s numerically and geographically determined social cachet.”
In 2009, it presented the “like” button, which fostered behavioral reinforcement making us like the pigeons pecking at buttons to get their little snack.
It made you feel personally, socially, and professionally disadvantaged if you weren’t on Facebook.
It promoted the idea of self as a brand
It became “proper etiquette to use Facebook for announcing important developments in one’s life.”
It supplanted the holiday card.
It chronicled children’s milestones.
It appealed to our addiction to gossip and became the equivalent of social grooming in primates.
Overview of Andrew Sullivan's "I Used to be a Human Being"
Virtual Living Gradually Sucks Us In
Living on the web has become normal. Everyone does it. It’s “ubiquitous.” It first seemed insane to post every 20 minutes. Now everyone does it. A world of addicts doesn’t seem like a big deal. We're all in addiction hell together.
Besides, it doesn't feel like hell. It's fun, right? Sullivan thought so till his Internet addiction almost killed him.
Sullivan is in a rehab center surrendering his phone. His health is deteriorating with frequent bronchial infections. He’s losing friends. He doesn't know how to be silent anymore. He’s about to write an essay titled “I Used to be a Human Being.”
He lost his humanity without thinking twice about it because everyone else was as well. If everyone is going crazy, then I don’t feel so crazy. I’m just like them.
Plus being on the Internet all day and night seemed like a winning move.
Being an Internet Star Has Its Appeal
Constant attention from a huge audience of hundreds of thousands of people
Constant commenting and conversational exchanges
Constant distractions, so one is never bored
A feeling of relevance and importance
Internet data helping us measure our ever-rising success and giving us the thrill of goal-setting
The Internet promises us More and More, an infinitely high layer-cake of wonder and possibility.
Signs of Addiction
He couldn’t read books without wanting to check the web.
He couldn’t be alone with his thoughts without wanting to check the web.
He couldn’t have real friends without wanting to leave them for the web.
He was addicted to attention-fragmentation.
“Multitasking” was to engage in no tasks at all; it was a worthless endeavor.
Adapting to New Technology
We adapted to the printing press, TV, computers, and other technologies. But what about the web? Is it different? Is it too early to tell? Could we have met our match here?
We read, “No information technology ever had this depth of knowledge of its consumers — or greater capacity to tweak their synapses to keep them engaged.”
Smartphone Made the Internet a 24/7 Affair:
Sullivan writes:
And the engagement never ends. Not long ago, surfing the web, however addictive, was a stationary activity. At your desk at work, or at home on your laptop, you disappeared down a rabbit hole of links and resurfaced minutes (or hours) later to reencounter the world. But the smartphone then went and made the rabbit hole portable, inviting us to get lost in it anywhere, at any time, whatever else we might be doing. Information soon penetrated every waking moment of our lives.
Smartphone Grew Rapidly
Sullivan observes:
And it did so with staggering swiftness. We almost forget that ten years ago, there were no smartphones, and as recently as 2011, only a third of Americans owned one. Now nearly two-thirds do. That figure reaches 85 percent when you’re only counting young adults. And 46 percent of Americans told Pew surveyors last year a simple but remarkable thing: They could not live without one. The device went from unknown to indispensable in less than a decade. The handful of spaces where it was once impossible to be connected — the airplane, the subway, the wilderness — are dwindling fast. Even hiker backpacks now come fitted with battery power for smartphones. Perhaps the only “safe space” that still exists is the shower.
Am I exaggerating? A small but detailed 2015 study of young adults found that participants were using their phones five hours a day, at 85 separate times. Most of these interactions were for less than 30 seconds, but they add up. Just as revealing: The users weren’t fully aware of how addicted they were. They thought they picked up their phones half as much as they actually did. But whether they were aware of it or not, a new technology had seized control of around one-third of these young adults’ waking hours.
An Alien Could Notice the Abrupt Change But Not Us
Sullivan points out:
Just look around you — at the people crouched over their phones as they walk the streets, or drive their cars, or walk their dogs, or play with their children. Observe yourself in line for coffee, or in a quick work break, or driving, or even just going to the bathroom. Visit an airport and see the sea of craned necks and dead eyes. We have gone from looking up and around to constantly looking down.
If an alien had visited America just five years ago, then returned today, wouldn’t this be its immediate observation? That this species has developed an extraordinary new habit — and, everywhere you look, lives constantly in its thrall?
Sullivan has similar thoughts about the Internet as does Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work:
Sullivan writes:
Yes, online and automated life is more efficient, it makes more economic sense, it ends monotony and “wasted” time in the achievement of practical goals. But it denies us the deep satisfaction and pride of workmanship that comes with accomplishing daily tasks well, a denial perhaps felt most acutely by those for whom such tasks are also a livelihood — and an identity.
Indeed, the modest mastery of our practical lives is what fulfilled us for tens of thousands of years — until technology and capitalism decided it was entirely dispensable. If we are to figure out why despair has spread so rapidly in so many left-behind communities, the atrophying of the practical vocations of the past — and the meaning they gave to people’s lives — seems as useful a place to explore as economic indices.
**
In other words, without prolonged focus, we cannot master a craft and derive the deep joy of such mastery.
Our Dependence on Dopamine and Instant Validation Has Made Us More Miserable, Not Happier
Sullivan observes:
Has our enslavement to dopamine — to the instant hits of validation that come with a well-crafted tweet or Snapchat streak — made us happier? I suspect it has simply made us less unhappy, or rather less aware of our unhappiness, and that our phones are merely new and powerful antidepressants of a non-pharmaceutical variety. In an essay on contemplation, the Christian writer Alan Jacobs recently commended the comedian Louis C.K. for withholding smartphones from his children. On the Conan O’Brien show, C.K. explained why: “You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away,” he said. “Underneath in your life there’s that thing … that forever empty … that knowledge that it’s all for nothing and you’re alone … That’s why we text and drive … because we don’t want to be alone for a second.”
He recalled a moment driving his car when a Bruce Springsteen song came on the radio. It triggered a sudden, unexpected surge of sadness. He instinctively went to pick up his phone and text as many friends as possible. Then he changed his mind, left his phone where it was, and pulled over to the side of the road to weep. He allowed himself for once to be alone with his feelings, to be overwhelmed by them, to experience them with no instant distraction, no digital assist. And then he was able to discover, in a manner now remote from most of us, the relief of crawling out of the hole of misery by himself. For if there is no dark night of the soul anymore that isn’t lit with the flicker of the screen, then there is no morning of hopefulness either. As he said of the distracted modern world we now live in: “You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel … kinda satisfied with your products. And then you die. So that’s why I don’t want to get a phone for my kids.”
**
In other words, constant media locks us into a sort of zombie state where we don’t confront our inner demons, but we don’t encounter deep joy as well. We are compromised as humans and less happy.
It appears we are maladapted to this much of a technology onslaught. We need huge periods of silence, Sullivan argues, for us to reclaim our humanity.
But look around. Who’s enjoying large stretches of silence? Everyone is constantly checking their smartphone.
The Paranoid Old People Defense of the Internet
When people say, “Old people are always paranoid about technology. Ever since the beginning, old people were saying the typewriter, the phone, the TV, the computer will ruin the world.”
But we’re not talking about technology as a quality so much as we’re talking about the sheer QUANTITY, an overwhelming wave the inundates us.
The Silence of a Library
Sullivan points out that places of worship and libraries require silence because they are pointing to modes of being that are beyond the constant noise and chatter we live in. The deep life of the spirit and the intellect and the imagination require silence.
Death at the hands of the Internet is slow:
The Internet nickels and dimes us to death, slowly chipping away at our time and our souls until we’re tattered zombies dependent on dopamine and validation.
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