bad, horrible, buzzfeed-y article. you all remember the history, right? It's fabled. The idea that there is "internet addiction" comes from a literal joke. Cyp

bad, horrible, buzzfeed-y article. you all remember the history, right? It's fabled. The idea that there is "internet addiction" comes from a literal joke. Cypherpunk pioneer Ivan Goldberg, 1994, posts a list of criteria for an addiction diagnosis to a messageboard as a joke. It was not meant to evoke addiction, but was already an ironic commentary on the looseness of addiction criteria, in order to laugh about how involvement and immersion in the messageboards that literally made the internet could fall under these criteria as well. Using these criteria ironically could show how almost any random behavior can be discredited as an addiction if people are passionate enough about it. The wider sociological point is that these are metaphorical uses of the addiction-as-disease concept (there is, after all, nothing entering the body here) that are used, socially, to heap a bit more denigration on socially disfavored activities. You don't get people blabbing on about soccer practice addiction, reading addiction, or tea addiction (on my fourth cup this morning.) Those are not disfavored activities. Also, there is a curiously obvious defense of normalized actions and preferences baked into addiction narratives. The old argument, "they do that rather than spend time with their family!" or "they do that rather than work!" never once questions that maybe that other thing they do.. is something they prefer over spending time with their family or (gasp!) working. It's just assumed that a "healthy" person would keep to social norm, be a good petit bourgie, and love to be productive for capitalism and really enjoys being locked into this model of the nuclear family. For sociologists, "addiction" is unthinkable without a concomitant value judgment that is anything but objective; it reproduced social desirabilities.