The Newest Addiction?

Apparently the American Journal of Psychiatry has suggested that text messaging and emailing may be a new form of addiction. Individuals develop a dependency (“it’s like a security blanket. I just feel really bare without it,” one quoted woman says) on ‘online communication’ that takes on addictive qualities, they say: it can be an expensive habit (equipment needed), it can be a destructive habit (not just because it takes time away from actual social interaction, but also because it takes your attention away from other important things, like driving), and, apparently, there are withdrawal symptoms in situations of deprivation.

This is interesting on so many levels. First of all it calls into question the definition of ‘addiction’. Is being ‘addicted’ to email the same phenomenon, neurologically speaking, as being addicted to alcohol? If so, when are you addicted? When you’re dependent on something? When your dependence on this ‘something’ takes on a destructive quality? Do you need to display withdrawal symptoms to prove you’ve been addicted? And is it always something biological? That is, is addiction always about a chemical transformation in your brain? A chemical dependence? If it were provable that a dependence on email and text-messaging has chemical effects on your brain, that would be amazing.

But there are other questions. The article apparently only talks about text messaging and emailing. What about people who spend most of their waking hours talking on the phone? The fact that the article talks only about ‘online communication’ – that is, indirect forms of communication – suggests to me that their pathologization of this ‘addiction’ is at least as much cultural as it may be biological (assuming, and hoping, that the APA will direct research toward the latter question, if they’re going to make statements like this). That is, dependency on email may be less of a biological pathology than a cultural taboo. Because I do think that our cultural standards have not quite caught up with our reality yet.
We seem to be right in the middle of the age of technology and information, leading lives so electronically mediated that it seems only natural that social interaction, too, should be digitized – and leading lives that leave us no time for any other, ‘old-fashioned’ forms of interaction. If I work 90 hours a week, get my entertainment from television and netflix, my music from an iPod and my news from the internet, why not use that same internet to network with other people in similar situations? Yet we refuse to accept these changing circumstances. We hold on to tradition, and face-to-face interactions remain the norm. Despite the fact that so many of us have no time for such networking outside of the work sphere, we stigmatize alternative forms of communication – and apparently, now, pathologize it as well.
We live, once again, with contradictory expectations. If we want to participate in any meaningful way in this fast-paced world – or even if we simply wish to keep up – we need to work: think about the single mother or minimum wage earner who needs to hold three jobs just to survive, the college graduate who is considered unambitious if she doesn’t snag a 90-hour-a-week consulting job in New York, or the woman who will never be taken seriously as a professional if she indicates any intention to have children (and thus, god-forbid, indicates she might be requesting maternity-leave at some point). Our industrial, technological, free-market society requires its citizens to become efficiency-machines.
Yet we value tradition, family, and ‘quality-time’. Time the free market doesn’t afford many of us. If we value face-to-face social interaction and old-fashioned social networks of support like people had 50 years ago, when no-one moved far from home and the economy allowed its working population more free time, that’s great. I applaud it. And if we believe all those studies that suggest physical contact with loved ones boosts our immune system, we have every reason to. But if we do, we need to make it possible. We need to have the time and opportunity to forge social connections. We need to recognize that we can’t have it all.
We can have something very close to it – the structure of social welfare that many North-Western European countries provide for their citizens really is not all that bad. A company CEO will never make as much as he could in the United States, but alternatively, everyone – including him – is assured of basic benefits and a liveable minimum wage, which means everyone can afford to work a little less.
Of course, North-Western Europeans are as ‘addicted’ to text messaging as Americans are…