Beyond the rhetoric of tech addiction: why we should be discussing tech habits instead (and how)

Abstract

In the past few years, we have become increasingly focused on technology use that is impulsive, unthinking, and distractive. There has been a strong push to understand such technology use in terms of dopamine addiction. The present article demonstrates the limitations of this so-called neurobehaviorist approach: Not only is it inconsistent in regard to how it understands humans, technologies, and their mutual relationship, it also pathologizes everyday human behaviors. The article proceeds to discuss dualsystems theory, which helpfully discusses impulsive technology use in terms of habit instead of addiction, but can be criticized for its mentalist celebration of conscious control. Finally, the article introduces a phenomenological approach whose conceptualization of habit manifests many of the experiential qualities that we try to capture with addiction, but remains non-pathologizing and opens a space for learning: While tech addiction is bad and must be eliminated, good tech habits can be trained and cultivated. :44). In the past few years, however, we have seen an increasing awareness that everyday technology use is often impulsive, unthinking, and that it sometimes draws attention away from other activities. In public discourse, there has been a strong push to understand such technology use in terms of addiction. The purpose of this article, however, is to displace this concept with the notion of habit. In making this argument, the article discusses three contemporary approaches to technology use: Neurobehaviorism, dual-systems theory, and phenomenology. The first approach is concerned with addiction, the latter two are concerned with habits. Each section in the article introduces one of these three approaches, provides an account of its key assumptions, and proceeds to discuss its implications. To enhance readability, I here provide a schematic preview of the end-result (see Table 1):

It’s still a thing: digital inequalities and their evolution in the information society

“…As we have initially mentioned, there is a growing public and academic interest in internet overuse or even addiction, although the latter is highly contested. While conceptual and empirical studies on this phenomenon are emerging (see e.g., Aagaard, 2020;Büchi et al, 2019;Helsper & Smahel, 2020;Kardefelt-Winther, 2014;Sutton, 2020), an encompassing picture of how digital inequalities relate to overuse and its implications is hitherto lacking. However, recent results have shown that sections of the population deal with the abundance of ICTs in their everyday lives differently and experience digital overuse at different rates (Gui & Büchi, 2021).…”

Social Media and Well-being: A Methodological Perspective

“…Tracking interactions with social media elements across platforms could increase the generalizability and replicability of findings, while still drawing on behavioral data. Additionally, focusing on elements, among other factors, will force a greater emphasis on the theoretical mechanisms driving proposed relations between SMU and well-being and avoid over-pathologizing everyday behaviour [41,42].…”

Media addictions as Apparatgeist: What discourse on TV and smartphone addiction reveals about society

“…One direction is discourse emphasizing the biomedical model of overuse (cf. Aagaard, 2021). This discourse compares TV addiction to substance abuse and emphasizes diagnosis through symptoms that match DSM-criteria for addiction.…”

“…People's relationship to their smartphone appears to be "fraught with ambivalences" (Ytre-Arne et al, 2020: p. 1726), as time spent on the phone is experienced as simultaneously rewarding and a waste of time. Interview studies show that people consider managing their screen time a personal responsibility (Ytre-Arne et al, 2020), and interpret failure to adequately do so as a result of their lack of self-control (Aagaard, 2021). These experiences may explain why up to a third of US parents and half of teens believe they spend too much time online (Jiang, 2018), and why half of teens and more than one in four parents in the US describe themselves as addicted to their smartphone (Felt and Robb, 2016).…”