Freedom and addiction in four discursive registers: A comparative historical study of values in addiction science

Weinberg, Darin

doi:10.1177/0952695120945962

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 73 publications

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“…While for most of its history (stretching back to the 1800s), addiction has been understood as a ‘disease of the will’, broadly used to diagnose a subjective sense of losing self‐control (Keane, 2002; Marlatt et al., 1988; Reith, 2019; Sedgwick, 1993; Weinberg, 2021), a key period for making sense of how the addiction concept has come to describe digital media usage begins in the 1980s. First, as Reinarman (2005, p. 312) has illustrated in a comparison of WHO definitions of addiction, by 1981, the WHO had established an ‘official’ definition of addiction that could fit ‘virtually any behaviour that is substituted for a prior behaviour—even behaviours that entail no use of psychoactive substances’ (Reinarman, 2005, p. 312; see also Keane, 2004).…”

Section: Technologies Of Consumption: Introducing ‘Addiction’mentioning

confidence: 99%

The social diagnoses of digital addictions: Technophobic ambivalences, the limits of the natural and imperatives of self‐governance in the information age

Taylor

2023

Sociology Health & Illness

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The contemporary visibility of ‘digital addictions’ to online gaming, watching pornography, social media and so on suggests the discovery of some new form of technologically facilitated disease. Yet, what we actually see in the symptoms of these various behaviours when described as ‘addictions’ are a series of social problems that range from the interpersonal to the sociocultural. In the current article, I work to step outside of the individualising tendency of an addiction taxonomy to instead view digital addictions as a process of social diagnosis. In this way, digital addictions are understood as a reaction to historically and socioculturally informed forces. Specifically, I contend that a social diagnosis of the digital addiction concept tells us a great deal about contemporary cultural anxiety towards the ubiquity of digital media in our social worlds as it rubs up against concerns for productivity, socially lauded ideas of ostensibly ‘natural’ behaviours and worries about self‐governance and self‐control. I conclude with a series of pertinent questions about digital technologies, which are elided—if not actively foreclosed—within an addiction framework and which can better be made sense of by understanding digital addictions as a process of social diagnosis rather than the expression of a new kind of Internet borne illness.

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Section: Technologies Of Consumption: Introducing ‘Addiction’mentioning

confidence: 99%

The social diagnoses of digital addictions: Technophobic ambivalences, the limits of the natural and imperatives of self‐governance in the information age

Taylor

2023

Sociology Health & Illness

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“…Following Alcoholics Anonymous (AA)’s de‐stigmatization of white middle‐class addictions, MRR treats alcoholism as a chronic, relapsing illness. MRR sees addiction as an “involuntary disease” requiring therapy, medication, and support through fellowship (Weinberg 2021). MRR's flexible mixture of AA with more cutting‐edge addiction science, popular psychology, and pharmaceutical regulation is typical of middle‐class (and elite) rehab, nurturing “bottom up” individualized self‐making rather than employing the “top down” medicine of state force.…”

Section: Introduction and Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Recovering Whiteness in Medical‐Restorative Rehab

Whetstone

Gowan

2022

Sociological Forum

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We present an ethnography of a highly medicalized rehab for stably employed, non-criminalized men in Minnesota-arguing that while its style of rehab is universalized in popular accounts, it actually represents a case of distinctly white, middle-class self-reinvention within the broader field of US addiction treatment. "Medicalrestorative rehab" at "Healing Bridges" offered Twelve-Step treatment, popular addiction science, and medication-based therapies to white suburbanites recovering from addiction. While many patients had engaged in substantial drug-related crime, the program's location outside the carceral state shielded participants from the stigma of criminalization, enabling them to construct their recovery as "voluntary" and restoring the fusion of white masculinity with self-controlled possessive individualism. Bridges naturalized patients' privileged social location as "treatment readiness"-mapping inner strength and willpower onto the white, middle-class self. The program then worked to instill techniques of self-management, convert addictions into productive pursuits, and regulate desires in an uncertain world. Despite Bridges' rhetoric of heroic hyperagency, self-governance was heavily supported by pharmaceutical interventions, shifting stigmatized drug dependence to licit pharmaceutical dependency constructed as responsible self-care. Our analysis extends the study of American rehab as an important institution for the reproduction of distinct classed, raced, and gendered constructions of self-hood and agency.

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“…For example, if people are unable to avoid repeating the same action choice, even when the current game environment punishes them for doing so and thus provides good reasons to innovate actions, one might question in what sense their actions are truly free. This conceptualization of free and autonomous action is widely used in understanding addiction (Weinberg, 2020; Weinberg, 2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Autonomous behaviour and the limits of human volition

Ota

Charlès

Haggard

2022

Preprint

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The capacity for autonomous behaviour is key to human intelligence, and fundamental to modern social life. However, experimental investigations of the cognitive bases of human autonomy are challenging, because experimental paradigms typically constrain behaviour using controlled contexts, and elicit behaviour by external triggers. In contrast, the sources of human autonomy and freedom are assumed to be endogenous. Here we propose a new theoretical construct of adaptive autonomy, meaning the capacity to make behavioural choices that are free from constraints of both immediate triggers and habitual responding. Participants played a competitive game in which they had to choose the right time to act, in the face of an opponent who punished (in separate blocks) either choice biases, habitual sequences of action timing across trials, or habitual responses to the effects of reinforcement. Adaptive autonomy with respect to each habit was measured by the ability to maintain performance against the opponent even when the corresponding habit was punished. We found that participants were able, under pressure from their opponent, to become free from habitual choices of when to act, but were not able to free themselves from win-stay, lose-shift patterns of reinforcement, even when these resulted in punishment. These results propose a new testing ground of autonomous behaviour as a flexible adaptation of more or less habitual behaviours that co-exist with different classes of external constraint.

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Freedom and addiction in four discursive registers: A comparative historical study of values in addiction science

Cited by 6 publications

References 73 publications

The social diagnoses of digital addictions: Technophobic ambivalences, the limits of the natural and imperatives of self‐governance in the information age

The social diagnoses of digital addictions: Technophobic ambivalences, the limits of the natural and imperatives of self‐governance in the information age

Recovering Whiteness in Medical‐Restorative Rehab

Autonomous behaviour and the limits of human volition

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