Choose your metaphors wisely

The term "digital detox" is now in the Oxford English Dictionary. This suggests a certain cultural awareness of the concept of media overuse which, to someone studying self-control and media use, is heartening. But I wonder about the choice of words.

"Detox"'s meaning, recently, related to food consumption, or the lack thereof. When you traded in the fast food for celery and refrained from consuming anything but tea, you were "detoxing", or "cleansing". But, of course, the term detox originally achieved notoriety when it was used in reference to addictive drugs like heroin. When I think of the term, I still think of it in terms of drugs.

Even beyond that single term, we are apt to think of new experiences in terms of older, more familiar ones. More and more, I hear people talk of Facebook or Candy Crush "addiction" which, again, conjures thoughts of hopeless alcoholics or strung-out meth-heads. Perhaps, in our effort to blame anyone but ourselves for the fact that we're unable to eschew immediately gratifying options for activities that will help us achieve our long-term goals, we want to trump up the power of our indulgences, and we do this by likening our habits to the almost-literally-irresistible urge of the crack addict to smoke more crack.

If we have to understand our new experiences with habitual digital media use in terms of older experiences (and, as much as people love to bad-mouth metaphors as some sort of crutch that keeps us from seeing new things as they truly are, I think this is the only way anything new can be understood at all, at least at first), then food and dieting would probably be a better metaphor than drugs.

Information (that is, the content of all media, digital or otherwise) is like food (and unlike, say, cocaine): we need it to survive. You can't really say no to media any more than you can say no to food. Getting too much of it is bad, but not nearly as bad as injecting large doses of certain drugs. Many more people struggle with tempting foods than with tempting drugs, and I think media over-use and habitual media use should be understood as things that are as common and as benign as bad eating habits, not as rare and harmful as drug addiction.

As time goes on, we'll understand our relationship with digital media on its own terms. But until then, its important to at least consider how our comparisons to other experiences (both in thought and language) affect our perception of threats and responsibilities.

I Always Feel Like Somebody's Watching ME

While listening to a new, poppy-sounding, dance-able Nine Inch Nails song about surveillance (and recalling an older, poppy-sounding, dance-able song about surveillance), I thought about how the topic of privacy and surveillance recurs in the news and in people's everyday conversations. Edward Snowden might just be the beginning of more elaborate, widespread considerations of these topics. Certainly, it's something that many young people have an opinion on, and the songs made me think about the ways in which it is woven into themes of popular television, films, and music.

If the Administration is to be believed, the US government isn't actually looking at everyone's data though they possess the ability to look at anyone's data. There's a logic to this: if your goal is to find potential terrorists (or, hell, if your goal is to find juicy bits of gossip), you wouldn't waste your time looking in detail at everyone's data. You'd try to develop algorithms for identifying people of interest and then dig deeper into their data.

Most acknowledge that authorities (governments, corporations) can "watch" us in this sense. Even the authorities themselves acknowledge that it is technically possible. But who is likely to believe that the authorities are telling the truth when they say that they're not looking at them, in particular?

Certainly, the degree to which one trusts authorities plays some role in this. But I think there's something else at play, something that I've been digging into in my recent research: narcissism. To assume that one is being watched, that one is a "person of interest", is to assume that one is interesting enough to be watched. It would follow that a certain type of person who tended to have narcissistic thoughts would be more likely to think that they were being watched and would express greater concern regarding privacy and surveillance.

Those who exhibit narcissistic tendencies in the age of digital media are in a bind. They want to get more information about themselves and their thoughts out there because they believe it's worth hearing, but they might be more concerned about the nefarious use of this information if they assume this information to be valuable (not just incriminating). They're the most exposed and the most concerned, so the thinking goes.

There's some preliminary evidence suggesting that those higher in narcissism have fewer privacy restrictions on some of their social media, which is, in a way, the opposite of what I would expect. Maybe if an individual high in narcissism were primed to think about corporate data miners or government surveillance with a news story, they would be more likely to change their privacy settings than another person. Maybe not.

If nothing else, the iconography and slogans of the pro-privacy movement are telling: Big Brother isn't watching us. He's watching you.

Do you have a Candy Crush Habit or a Candy Crush Addiction?

Most of my recent research concerns media habits and/or what you might call "unconscious" media use. These are the times when we open up a tab on our web browsers and go to a website without thinking too deeply about why we're doing this or considering the long-term value of such an act. Over time, such behavior become habits, and habits can be hard to break. It seems that if habits are sufficiently difficult to break, we call them addictions.

But I, like many others in the field of psychology, am not too keen on applying the term "addiction" to habitual media use. Why not? If you're playing Candy Crush Saga five hours a day and you feel unable to stop playing, what is the difference if we call this a bad habit or an addiction?

Well, I suppose it has to do with how our culture currently understands addiction. We treat it as a disease that requires professional intervention. We assume, as is the case with most diseases, that the afflicted is not responsible for their affliction and that it is unlikely that they can get better on their own. They need help. This diagnosis is well-meaning in the sense that when people are going through something bad (and the feeling of being unable to stop doing something is usually bad) it would be worse to heap the extra guilt that comes with responsibility for their current condition (and for altering the condition) on top of their existing troubles. In addition, professionals have years of experience dealing with addictions and decades of research to help develop systems for fighting addiction.

But there's something that's lost: the individual's sense of self-efficacy, the sense that they can do something about the behavior. In some cases, it's possible that self-efficacy can be an important part of altering habitual/addictive behavior, that the individual finding a way to change their behavior is more effective and efficient than sending all of those individuals to professionals and/or through a series of institutions.

As more people find themselves with habits/addictions to games like Candy Crush, it's important to address the following questions: What role does self-efficacy play in breaking habits? If we call the habit an addiction, does this diagnosis reduce the person's sense of self-efficacy thereby making it harder (or perhaps more expensive) to quit?

This isn't to say that simply labeling this kind of behavior as "habits" isn't without drawbacks. People may not take the threat that their behavior poses as seriously if they call it a habit (most of us have bad habits, after all). Even when we do call the behavior addiction, we're increasingly liberal in our use of that term which waters it down (much like the term "stalking", which is used in a casual, everyday sense).

So, whether we call this kind of behavior "addiction", I think, is not just a matter of semantics. It is possible that diagnosis affects self-efficacy, which affects likelihood of behavior change. Whether you call it addiction or habit, the end game should be the same: understanding how people stop doing things that they, at first, feel they are unable to stop doing. But it's important to recognize the role of words and diagnoses in that process.