> So next time you spot a headline that warns you of the disastrous mental health effects of digital technology or how the internet might degrade your mental ca

> So next time you spot a headline that warns you of the disastrous mental health effects of digital technology or how the internet might degrade your mental capacities to those of a lake-living vertebrate, remember these common journalistic fallacies. If it sounds too sensational to be true, it most likely is It seems like the writer is really splitting hairs here. So someone who doesn't gamble online but doomscrolls Twitter is not addicted to something? The author seems to avoid the meaning of screen time (e.g. gachas, reddit, etc) with a literal interpretation of the word. This particular quote strikes me as rather weird given the credentials of the author: > The fact that phone use triggers dopamine releases in the brain is sometimes used as an argument that tech companies are hijacking our brains. Screens are often compared with hard drugs, and are frequently called “addictive.” The thing is, everything that makes you feel good involves dopamine. Receiving a text from your grandmother or ticking off an item on your to-do list also triggers a release of dopamine, so does having a tasty meal. This reads like a Phillip-Morris headline on the reason "cigarettes aren't any worse than soda". There's a distinct difference between the dopamine hit I get in order to fulfill a biological necessity and one I get because of UIs designed in a lab. If it wasn't dopamine these ad agencies are targeting why do many studies produced by them mention increasing the addictive ability by raising rewards? The science is pretty much conclusive on spaced reward mechanisms. The author here seems to be deliberately obtuse, going so far as to commit the same fallacies they are trying to show are misunderstood. Sometimes I wish blog posts had to state conflicting interests. Something smells fishy here.