Sample Synthesis Essays

Tolerating a Partial Buy-In: Should We Attempt to Reduce Internet Addiction?

by Peter Garver

Imagine sitting at home one evening and losing your connection to the internet. Everywhere – on your phone, your computer, your smart TV. You can still make phone calls, the power is still on, but there are no apps, no websites, no games, no social media, even no texting. Does this scenario make you a bit uncomfortable? Maybe more than a little? That’s a normal response for people living highly connected lives today. In a 2016 book, scholar Mary Aiken described a colleague who attempted to conduct a study in which participants would not have access to their phones for several days, but was unable to do so, because no one was willing to give their phone up for that long (627). Constant connectedness has a lot to offer us, but it is worth considering its negative aspects as well. While the internet, mobile phones, and social media can be valuable and enriching tools, using them without considering the ways that they alter our ways of thinking, and specifically the ways that they are engineered to keep us constantly engaged, is a dangerous choice for us as individuals and as a society.

The only reason it is worthwhile having a discussion about the risks of online life is that there can be great value in online life: otherwise it could safely be treated like heroin use and regulated with a simple goal of reducing harm. In his essay ““We Are Here For You”: The It Gets Better Project, Queering Rural Spaces, and Cultivating Queer Media Literacy,” Mark Hain describes the It Gets Better Project, a series of videos that was created in 2011 in the wake of a series of publicly acknowledged teen suicides with the goal of mitigating the loneliness and hopelessness that queer teens feel in communities that are not accepting of them (526). Hain focuses on the videos created by people living in rural spaces, and the positive effect that they could have on teenagers in rural communities who are in the process of forming identities and determining how they fit into the world (532-538). He contrasts this with his own teenage years, in which the only examples he had of queer identity came from mainstream media (529-532). Through this contrast, Hain demonstrates the value of online life both in its ability for two way communication, even in the mostly one-way medium of YouTube, and also in its ability to host content that has a very small audience, such as his example of videos specifically directed at queer rural teenagers. This is a small and very specific example of the power of connectivity and online community, and it rules out the option of dismissing the value of online life altogether.

Having established that there is value in connectedness, it may be worthwhile to consider that there should be limits on connection. That is to say, that being disconnected sometimes may be healthy for our minds. In “Growing Up Tethered,” Sherry Turkle discusses texting, collecting testimony primarily from young people who are frequent texters. Turkle suggests that constant connectedness through texting may change the way people’s brains develop in several ways. She suggests that the ability to contact multiple people at any time may lead to a tendency to seek validation for one’s thoughts through others, rather than examining their feelings on their own (583). She also considers the stress of forming online personas, and quotes from interviews with young people who feel that online social media networks demand high levels of engagement which can be a source of stress and consume a lot of energy (588-590). One of the students Turkle interviewed, a high school senior named Brad, became disillusioned with online life and took a break. When he attempted to re-enter online life without fully committing himself, he found it difficult, because as Turkle describes it, “Facebook … does not easily tolerate a partial buy-in” (589). The side effects of engagement, including shifts in our perception of our own thoughts and stress about an added workload of keeping up appearances on social media, have a cost that should be weighed against the benefit of the connectedness and community that it can provide.

Brad’s discovery about the difficulty of partially engaging with Facebook is neither unique to Brad, nor to that platform, and this is at least partially because the companies that host social media networks and other online services can only make money when we engage with their services, whether their income comes from advertising or from the sale of data. Evan Kindley examines this situation in “Quiz Mania,” an excerpt from a 2016 book. Kindley considers the phenomenon of online quizzes, popularized by the site BuzzFeed in the 2010s. These quizzes are valuable to BuzzFeed and to other sites that make them, and Kindley discusses two key aspects to their value: their ability to draw people in, and the data that they generate (509-512). The quizzes have been optimized, by trial and error, to maximize engagement; the quick feedback loop of internet development and deployment meant that the staff of BuzzFeed was able to determine what worked and what didn’t work very quickly, and push their future quizzes in a direction to get more people to complete them (511). The data that the quizzes generate can, in aggregate, create a profile of a person’s personality that might be valuable if sold to potential employers or other potential buyers (512-513). Creating a quiz that generates both high levels of engagement and valuable personal data is obviously desirable, but if the first page of a quiz stated plainly “The presentation of this quiz is designed to make you want to complete it, and the questions are designed to generate valuable information about you that we can sell to third parties without your knowledge,” it is likely not as many people would complete it. Online companies work constantly to increase our engagement in the pursuit of profits, and they do so without disclosing their intentions to us, which for the most part deprives us of the ability to make an informed choice in the matter.

BuzzFeed optimizes their quizzes to maximize profit, without warning us or considering whether it is in our best interest. They are not alone, of course. In her article “Designed to Addict,” Mary Aiken describes both compulsive responses to ordinary internet activities such as checking email, as well as games and websites that are optimized to maximize engagement and keep users coming back. Near the beginning of her article, Aiken explains that it is known in behavioral psychology that intermittent reinforcement is an effective way to get people to continue an activity or to repeat it, and that it is more effective than being rewarded every time (618). She explains how this is exploited by lotteries and casinos to keep people gambling, and also how it is exploited by game developers and social networking sites to keep people engaged (618-619). She also explains how social networking sites and games trigger the reward system in the brain in various ways, meeting various innate needs with different types of notifications (619). Aiken gives some scientific support for the addictive nature of online activity by discussing the “seeking” system in the brain, which is controlled by the neurotransmitter dopamine and leads people to seek out novelty and explore, but in a modern context makes people vulnerable to addiction, and identifies this problem as particularly acute on the internet, which she describes as “infinity in terms of seeking” (619-620). She cites various studies that place the incidence of internet addiction, which can be defined in different ways, between 1% and 15% of people, but also quotes research stating that while 98% of respondents knew that texting while driving was dangerous, 75% still did it (625-627). By the time she concludes with the story of the research study that failed because no one would give up their phone, she has made a convincing case that internet use can be addictive, and that this is in part because some people choose to make it more addictive for business reasons.

We have learned from Mary Aiken that we are innately susceptible to addictive and compulsive behaviors online, just because it is seemingly infinite and always accessible. In her article, as well as in Sherry Turkle’s and Evan Kindley’s, we see evidence that these behaviors are profitable for internet companies and are encouraged, perhaps through simple trial and error (as in Kindley’s BuzzFeed example), and perhaps through more intentional means, as is done in the gambling industry. But as much as we may be in danger of manipulation, Mark Hain’s article reminds us that the internet offers types of connectivity and community that have never been possible before, and may give us a chance to imagine ourselves as part of a community when we have no other way to feel like we belong. Taken together, these articles give me the impression that neither of the extreme choices are good – we should not eliminate the internet (as if we could), and we should not allow it to be a complete free-for-all for our attention, as it is now. Alcohol, tobacco, and gambling are all highly addictive, and all are at least regulated in their ability to advertise to children, and there has been education provided for adults on how addictive they can be. It is, however, perfectly legal to give a child a phone with Facebook and Candy Crush on it, and there has been no widespread discussion of what effect this might have on the child during their childhood or in the long term as they mature. I think it would be very helpful to have a public discussion about online activities that promote addiction and consider at the very least a warning label system, and since unfortunately there is no money to be made in keeping people from getting addicted to phones, this would probably have to occur by a government mandate. I’m not sure what it would take to make this happen. Mary Aiken’s essay begins with the story of a 22-year-old mother who accidentally killed her child in 2010 when he interrupted her during a game of Candy Crush (615). This, apparently, was not enough to start a discussion. I would like to hope that something will be, because if we wait until a supermajority of the population has fully bought in to addiction to apps and games, there may be no one left to vote in favor of trying to find a happy medium between the infinity of the internet and the reward systems of our brains.

Works Cited

Aiken, Mary “Designed to Addict” From Inquiry to Academic Writing: A Text and Reader,

edited by Stuart Greene and April Lidinsky, Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2018,

pp. 614-627.

Hain, Mark “’We Are Here For You’: The It Gets Better Project, Queering Rural Space,

and Cultivating Queer Media Literacy” From Inquiry to Academic Writing: A Text

and Reader, edited by Stuart Greene and April Lidinsky, Bedford / St. Martin’s,

2018, pp. 525-540.

Kindley, Evan “Quiz Mania” From Inquiry to Academic Writing: A Text and Reader,

edited by Stuart Greene and April Lidinsky, Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2018,

pp. 508-514.

Turkle, Sherry “Growing Up Tethered” From Inquiry to Academic Writing: A Text

and Reader, edited by Stuart Greene and April Lidinsky, Bedford / St. Martin’s,

2018, pp. 578-591.

“Tolerating a Partial Buy-In: Should We Attempt to Reduce Internet Addiction?” by Peter Garver is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.