Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked Kindle Edition

As soon as I came across "Irresistible", I couldn't wait to read it. And then, when I read the credentials of its author - Dr. Adam Alter - I was even more excited! I wanted to know what a professor of psychology and marketing at New York University had to say about the rise of behavioral addiction! I wanted to connect with someone who understands the consequences of behavioral addictions - especially Internet Addiction - and how it is impacting the well-being and health of adults' lives and even more importantly, that of our children's.For over the past seven years, I have been researching, writing, and speaking about cyber bullying. Although I emphasize the importance of protection and intervention in dealing with this harmful behavior, I always stress the importance of "prevention" and of addressing "causation". I want audiences to understand that cyber bullying is not a "cause" of anything - it is a "symptom" reflective of a change in the human condition. It is a symptom of the "slow erosion of the human empathic spirit". Technology itself is not inherently bad; however, it is our "relationship" with technology which facilitates harmful actions and often contributes to dangerous disorders and/or behavioral dependence or addiction.Although I found "Irresistible" to be "irresistible", the two parts I found most informative were Part 1: "What Is Behavioral Addiction And Where Did It Come From?" and Part Three: "The Future of Behavioral Addiction (And Some Solutions)". I especially appreciated Dr. Alter's explanation of how behavioral addiction develops from an individual's desire to meet basic human needs, and thus, he normalizes the experience rather than pathologizing it. While Dr. Alter clearly diffentiates between obsessions, compulsions, passions, and "behavioral addiction", he also cautions readers, "We shouldn't use a watered-down term to describe them, we should acknowledge how serious they are, how much harm they're doing to our collective well-being, and how much attention they deserve. The evidence so far is concerning, and trends suggest we're wading deeper into dangerous waters." Dr. Alter supports his findings with opinions and research studies from many of the most notible in the field.As a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, I also appreciated Part Three: Chapter 10 - "Nipping Behavioral Addictions at Birth." Although Dr. Alter thoroughly discusses a myriad of behavioral approaches and methodololgies to treatment of Internet Addiction, I found his list of three major qualities of healthy screen time to most helpful for parents/gaurdians: "First, parents should encourage their children to connect what they see in the screen world to their eperience of the real world... Second, active engagement is better than passive viewing...Third, screen time should always focus on the content of the app rather than the techology itself." In addition, in order to mitigate the harmful effects of screen time, Dr. Alter stresses the importance of family "face to face" time communicating and socially interacting and working towards a healthy "balance" in our relationship with technology.In conclusion, I highly recommend "Irresistible" to a variety of audiences (health care professionals, educators, counselors, therapists, parent/guardians) but especially to those who may be struggling with the concept of "Internet Addiction" or "Screen Dependence". The harmful effects of excessive screen time are well-documented; and unfortunately, the damaging consequences are much more severe for the developing brains of our young children. However, I want to stress once again, technology itself is not the cause of the problem. It is our degree of access and exposure to and consumption of it! Because we, as adults, enjoy our screen time and we see everyone else doing so, it is hard to change our behaviors! If we find it "Irresistible", imagine how hard it must be for our children!Holli Kenley, M.A., MFT  Cyber Bullying No More: Parenting A High Tech Generation (Growing with Love) Another Way: A Novel

This was a book group book and it was surprisingly interesting. The premise is that fully half of the world have developed behavioral addictions, often to the internet itself. The constant barrage of information- not so long ago unfathomable- now traps people in a web of reliance on their phones and begins to interfere with their human relationships.He goes further, into an explanation of how game developers have actually worked to make their games addictive. They start out free, of course, or just a nominal fee to download the app. It’s all fun and fine for the first few weeks, but then the gamer realizes they can’t win without those power-ups. All available for a small cost. All at once the gamer realizes they’ve spent the groceries money or, worse yet, the rent on power ups and they still aren’t in the top position in the games. They become “addicted to the challenge, they can’t seem to get away from it.The author talked about businesses which have been created to rehabilitate addicted internet users. The relapse rate for them, like the drug addict’s relapse rate is huge. The problem is that the rehabilitated user cannot rerun to the old life: the same living situation, the same group of friends, the same life. The have to create a new one in order to avoid relapsing. One of his examples focused on heroin-addicted GIs returning from South Vietnam. Interestingly, few of them relapsed after treatment. He explains that because they were removed from the circumstance of their addiction, they were able to leave the heroin behind.It was just the location, but all that went with it. The stress of constant anticipation of an attack, the boredom of waiting for something to happen, the easy access to drugs all played a part. But when they went home to Ottumwa, heroin wasn’t that easy to find. They were home with Mom, family and friends, able to find gainful employment or go back to school - all made it easier not to miss their heroin habit.An internet addition is harder (in some way) to overcome. How do you avoid the internet on today’s world? The author doesn’t really propose a solid answer, but he does give us a lot to think about. It made me realize how much time I spent everyday playing games on my phone. It becomes difficult to put it down so that I can focus on a conversation or a child’s plea for me to ‘war the, watch!” I don’t want to be that distant person. Yep, definitely ineluctable a lot to think about!

Scary facts about how we are being influenced by our PDA's (Pocket Distraction Agents) and what to do to conquer this time pirate.

extremely interesting read!

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If it is your first book, then sure, it is 5/5 book. However, if you red many books and know what the book should be like, then you will be disappointed, because it is not a book. It is a collection of anecdotes. Not only it is a collection of anecdotes but is also a collection of authors failing attempts to connect those anecdotes.Sometimes I felt genuinely insulted. For example, author talked about Super Mario, and how that game was good, because it was easy for the newbies to learn how to play it without explicit tutorials. Then author described a game where you bet for 20 dollars and if you bet higher than your friend, you will win those 20 dollars. The problem was that you did not stop after the bet of 20 dollars, because the loss will mean much more. And then the author concludes: "For my students, the hook was the slim chance of winning twenty dollars at the heavy discount. In my case, the hook was a plumber named Mario in search of a kidnapped princess." Seriously? How is that even connected?Then the author includes a lot of unnecessary information and unnecessary stories (that also have no connection at all to the main theme of the book) just because he knows them. For example, the author described for 2 pages the personalities of researchers. Why should I care? The research itself was described in 2 pages and the people were not mentioned ever again. Why do you describe their personalities of those researchers for 2 more pages?And It happens all the time. The author writes stories that he knows of, and then tries really hard to connect them to the main narrative (one example is on the page 212, if you have the book). And you know what is the main narrative? There is no main narrative. It is just a collection of stories.His interview on Fresh Air is 100 times better than the book and only discusses a small fraction of it longer than the book does.

I liked the first two thirds of the book. It gives a good introduction to the field and entertianingly presents base insigths like intermittent rewards or general social pressure in games. But as a long time WoW player (addict ?) I was hoping for a more detailed analysis. WoW is presented as the main evil (of the past/for men) and retained a complete boogeyman myth, too dangerous to even try for research.E.G. I miss discussions on- how the profession progression in the game mimics real learning and buildup of dexterity while you learn exactly nothing- how the quests address real life virtues and archaic instincs "to save the helpless children in our village you need patience and discipline"- how beeing rescued by a high level player motivates to level up to become a helping hero yourself- how a plethora of side activities neutralizes the need for doing something different than "gaming" (leveling/raiding) "I dont play, I just skill/farm etc.)- the deep feeling of rejection when beeing "kicked" from a group that after a short phase of dreading the game rebounds as even fiercer motivation to become too valuable to be kickedWhen it comes to the consequences of addiction the book descends into the dogmatic realm of "should" where most of the psychologic/sociologic books fail. As there is no real scientific reason not to become a tyrrant (except for the fact that it's impossible for many people to do this simultaneously) the authors construct visions of "healthy behaviour" that stem from statistics "healthy people are normal as they reside in the center of all our normal distributions" or implicit self-praise of the author "normal people need to grow up like most kids did when I was a child".Here the book leaves the ground of empiric facts and accepts isolated experts' statments as normative truth.A contradictive example from MMOs: At some point (for example when choosing or even creating addons) players start to see behind the surface and consider the underlying technology. This ability might be way more usefull in a gamificated future than to recognize the mood of Mona Lisa with one look, what is - without second thought - used as a measure of the positive effekts of sulking in the woods.