Internet…The New Las Vegas?

When you think of Las Vegas, you automatically think gambling and casinos. Is it a bad thing that view Vegas as just a place with gambling, casinos, and people blowing their money just to see if they can win big time, not necessarily but we will never stop thinking that until we actually experience Vegas ourselves. So many people gamble and when they don’t win or lose all their money it changes how people act the next day because of this gambling is known as an impulse control disorder and it is also considered an addictive disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Not too far behind being considered as an addictive disorder and placed in the DSM-5 as one is the internet because it so similar to what determines a gambling disorder. When it comes to Mae, after being given her job at The Circle she becomes so distant with everything around her besides what is right in front of her on a computer screen. Because of this obsession with keeping her CE average up, her PartiRank up, and her viewers up, relationships with family and friends begin to fall apart. The Circle by Dave Eggers shows that the Internet can and will be harmful to everyday life, if nothing is done to stop future addictions.

For many people today the internet is something they can’t get enough of. It’s become such a necessity that people can’t even put their phones down at the dinner table. Because the internet and technology are becoming so popular psychologists are starting to see the internet as a process addiction. A process addiction is an addiction to activities or processes such as gambling, eating, tanning, video/gaming, spending, sex, Internet surfing, and work as opposed to a “substance addiction” like that of drugs or alcohol. Internet addiction had become such a global concern that number of Internet users worldwide nearly doubled from “1.11 billion to 1.97 billion to 3 billion at the end of 2014” (Exploring Internet Addiction as a Process Addiction). Two psychologists by the names of Griffiths and Young came up with the idea of the term “‘internet addiction’ and they eventually related it to an impulse control disorder, such as pathological gambling, to describe uncontrolled Internet use resulting in maladaptive social, occupational, and interpersonal behavior” (Exploring Internet Addiction as a Process Addiction). There are many things people use the Internet for, things such as “multiplayer games, gambling, pornography, virtual sex, shopping, and social networking” (Exploring Internet Addiction as a Process Addiction). With all the things the Internet does there is one question that comes to mind that is Internet just a medium for becoming addicted or is it just a way to give into other addictions. Some psychologists aren’t even sure if “Internet overuse is a behavioral manifestation of psychosocial distress or if Internet overuse precedes psychosocial distress” (Exploring Internet Addiction as a Process Addiction). There are also several studies that say that the cause of Internet addiction has to do with “negative interpersonal consequences such as social withdrawal, disruption of family stability, neglect of recreational activities, and poor academic performance” (Exploring Internet Addiction as a Process Addiction). There are no universally known sets of Internet addiction diagnostic conditions but associated behaviors of Internet addiction are just as harmful as if there actually were known sets.

When Mae Holland gets hired at the Circle, one of the worlds greatest internet companies, she believes she is given the opportunity of a lifetime. Mae starts out in Customer Experience, where she has help with customers with questions they have about a certain product and after each question a survey is given out asking about the experience they had, with each survey comes an average and Mae has the opportunity to increase that average to 100. This is the first thing Mae becomes obsessed with increasing. After she’s been at the Circle for a few weeks she gets a PartiRank, which is basically a popularity contest. Mae can increase her PartiRank by zinging, smiling, commenting, and posting about random things. When Mae first hears about how low her PartiRank is she spends about 9 hours trying to increase it,

“Mae looked at the time. It was six o’clock. She had plenty of hours to improve, there and then, so she embarked on a flurry of activity, sending four zings and thirty-two comments and eighty-eight similes. In an hour her PartiRank rose to 7,288. Breaking 7,000 was more difficult, but by eight o’ clock, after joining and posting in eleven discussion groups, sending another twelve zings, one of them rated in the top 5,000 globally for that hour, and signing up for sixty-seven more feeds, she’d done it. She was at 6,782, and turned to her InnerCircle social feed. She was a few hundred posts behind, and she her way through, replying to seventy or so messages, RSVPing to eleven events on campus, signing nine petitions, and providing comments and constructive criticism on four products currently in beta. By 10:16 her rank was 5,342, and again, the plateau — this time at 5,000 — was hard to overcome. She wrote a series of zings about new Circle service, allowing account holders to know whenever their name was mentioned in any messages sent from anyone else, and one of the zings, her seventh on the subject, caught fire and was rezinged 2,904 times, and this brought her PartiRank up to 3,887…she was determined to break 3,000. And she did so, though it was 3:19 a.m.” (Eggers 191–192).

This is the second thing Mae becomes obsessed with increasing. After Mae has been at the Circle for a few months, she becomes transparent. Being transparent at The Circle means everyone and their cousins are seeing what they are doing except using the bathroom, of course. Mae becomes transparent immediately after she pens three lines for the Circle, “secrets are lies, sharing is caring, and privacy is theft.” She immediately knew she wanted to show the world what she saw. This is last thing Mae becomes obsessed with increasing. Mae has an internet addiction because of how fast she rose within the Circle was all because of internet and technology. If she falls back on what she accomplished she won’t know what to do and that darkness that she felt as became more and more popular and public will take her.

This may sound like a bunch of mumbo jumbo but if you actually just sit back and take in what I am trying to say, it might make sense. All am trying to say is that the internet and technology is becoming such a necessity in our life that if it disappears we wouldn’t know what to do and become just like Mae and have this darkness take us away.