Physically, we are what we are. So while we like to think of humans as adaptable creatures, the plain truth is that because of our complexity and longevity, we aren’t nearly as quick to physically adapt as are many other species. In the nineteenth century, the thick smoke from factories in England annihilated white lichens covering tree bark, rendering the previously well-camouflaged white Peppered Moth extremely vulnerable to bird predators. But in just a few years, the previously rare black moths from the same species became dominant, and the Peppered Moth was saved. In recent years, as factory soot has waned in that area and the tree bark has subsequently become light again, evolution has pulled a quick about-face: The moths, too, are white again. Human evolution, for better or worse, is not so swift; because of this, we may not be able to keep pace with our own technology. Our brains have remained structurally consistent for over 50,000 years, yet exposure to processed information in this century has increased by a factor of thousands (lately, the volume and speed of information has been increasing as much as 100 percent each year). Something has to give.Source: David Shenk, Data Smog (1997)

Just as fat has replaced starvation as this nation’s number one dietary concern, information overload has replaced information scarcity as an important new emotional, social, and political problem. “The real issue for future technology,” says Columbia’s Eli Noam, “does not appear to be production of information, and certainly not transmission. Almost anybody can add information. The difficult question is how to reduce it.” Source: David Shenk, Data Smog (1997)

Audio buffs have long been familiar with the phrase signal-to-noise ratio. It is engineering parlance for measuring the quality of a sound system by comparing the amount of desired audio signal to the amount of unwanted noise leaking through. In the information age, signal-to-noise has also become a useful way to think about social health and stability. How much of the information in our midst is useful, and how much of it gets in the way? What is our signal-to-noise ratio? We know that the ratio has diminished of late, and that the character of information has changed: As we have accrued more and more of it, information has emerged not only as a currency, but also as a pollutant. Source: David Shenk, Data Smog (1997)

At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory. In that vein, recent imaging studies of people have found that major cross sections of the brain become surprisingly active during downtime. These brain studies suggest to researchers that periods of rest are critical in allowing the brain to synthesize information, make connections between ideas and even develop the sense of self. Researchers say these studies have particular implications for young people, whose brains have more trouble focusing and setting priorities. “Downtime is to the brain what sleep is to the body,” said Dr. Rich of Harvard Medical School. “But kids are in a constant mode of stimulation.” Source: Matt Richtel, NYT (2010)

From childhood onward, we have usually allowed others to process the information we receive — to filter it. As technology writer Clay Shirky argues, what we think is information overload is actually a function of “filter failure.” When we feel overwhelmed by the quantity of news and information we encounter, it’s a sign that we have just not figured out how to manage our flows of information. Concentration, mental discipline, and time management count as filters. So does Google. Source: Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything (and why we should worry) (2011)

The automobile, which gave us the freedom to go where we wanted when we wanted, which created the suburbs, served as the backbone of much of the prosperity boom of the twentieth century. When it was first invented, no one foresaw its grim side effects — urban sprawl, long commutes, dependence on unstable political regimes for fossil fuels, pollution, and hollowed-out cities. And now we have the Internet, whose side effects we are experiencing like nothing else in the past. Source: William Davidow, Overconnected: The Promise and Threat of the Internet (2011)

Karl Marx famously called religion the “opiate of the masses.” Well, to paraphrase Reggie Hammond, Eddie Murphy’s character in the film 48 Hours, “There’s a new opiate in town and its name is technology.” Yes, folks, everywhere you look these days, you see people “shooting up” their technological “drug” of choice, whether emails, text messages, Twitter or Facebook feeds, YouTube videos, streaming movies and TV shows, or playing app games on their smartphones. Concerns about this “drug” have been gaining increasing attention in recent years. The words Internet and addiction have become conjoined and are now a part of our technology lexicon (usually by people who say it dismissively with a smirk as they ingest this drug through their favorite delivery system, whether computer, tablet, or smartphone). A 2010 survey found that 61% of Americans (the number is higher among young people) say they are addicted to the Internet. Another survey reported that “addicted” was the word most commonly used by people to describe their relationship to technology. Source: Dr. Jim Taylor, Seattle PI (2012)

One day last fall, my wife and I were working in a café, each of us on a laptop, when she looked up. “Hey, what’s the name of that red-haired singer who plays the piano?” I knew who she was talking about but drew a blank. I could visualize the singer sitting at her piano and playing, something I’d seen on several videos. I remembered that she’d done a piano cover of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” But I couldn’t attach a name. I sat there stupidly, mentally paralyzed, until suddenly I hit upon a strategy for finding the name. “Google this,” I told Emily. “‘Piano cover, Smells Like Teen Spirit.’” She bashed her keyboard and laughed: “Tori Amos!” The exchange took no more than fifteen seconds. What’s the line between our own, in-brain knowledge and the sea of information around us? Does it make us smarter when we can dip in so instantly? Or dumber with every search? Source: Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better (2014)

Exploring the Neuroscience of Internet Addiction

Bill Davidow (The Atlantic, 2012)

The leaders of Internet companies face an interesting, if also morally questionable, imperative: either they hijack neuroscience to gain market share and make large profits, or they let competitors do that and run away with the market.

In the Industrial Age, Thomas Edison famously said, “I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent.” In the Internet Age, more and more companies live by the mantra “create an obsession, then exploit it.” Gaming companies talk openly about creating a “compulsion loop,” which works roughly as follows: the player plays the game; the player achieves the goal; the player is awarded new content; which causes the player to want to continue playing with the new content and re-enter the loop.

It’s not quite that simple. Thanks to neuroscience, we’re beginning to understand that achieving a goal or anticipating the reward of new content for completing a task can excite the neurons in the ventral tegmental area of the midbrain, which releases the neurotransmitter dopamine into the brain’s pleasure centers. This in turn causes the experience to be perceived as pleasurable. As a result, some people can become obsessed with these pleasure-seeking experiences and engage in compulsive behavior such as a need to keep playing a game, constantly check email, or compulsively gamble online. A recent Newsweek cover story described some of the harmful effects of being trapped in the compulsion loop.

The release of dopamine forms the basis for nicotine, cocaine, and gambling addictions. The inhalation of nicotine triggers a small dopamine release, and a smoker quickly becomes addicted. Cocaine and heroin deliver bigger dopamine jolts, and are even more destructive.

In the past, companies used customer surveys, focus groups, interviews, and psychological tests to figure out how to make products more appealing to customers. In 1957, Vance Packard published The Hidden Persuaders, in which he identified eight hidden needs — including a consumer’s desire to love and be loved, or a yearning for power — which advertisers could exploit to create demand for their products.

Packard, who questioned the morality of exploiting emotions in order to sell products, died in 1996. Were he alive today, he would surely be shocked to see how primitive the exploitation techniques he described now seem.

Today we can monitor the brain’s response with NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) imaging to more accurately measure what people are experiencing when they play online games, interact with smart devices, or gamble. Luke Clark, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, used brain scans to determine that when gamblers felt they could exert control over a game’s outcome — for example, by throwing the dice harder, or pulling the lever on a slot machine with more force — it increased their interest in playing. Also, such near misses as getting two out of three matching symbols on a slot machine stimulated the desire to continue to play. Other experiments have shown that optimizing a slot machine’s frequency of near misses can extend gambling times by 30 percent. Neuroscientists have also found that it is the unpredictability of winning large rewards that stimulates the dopamine releases that compels gamblers to return.

When compulsive behavior undermines our ability to function normally, it enters the realm of obsessive-compulsive disorder. By some estimates around 2 to 4 percent of serious gamblers are addicted, and some 10 percent (it may be less or more since most people under-report addiction ) of Internet users have become so obsessed with the Internet that its use is undermining their social relationships, their family life and marriage, and their effectiveness at work. As the performance of Internet-connected devices improves, and as companies learn how to use neuroscience to make virtual environments more appealing, that number will undoubtedly increase.

Many Internet companies are learning what the tobacco industry has long known — addiction is good for business. There is little doubt that by applying current neuroscience techniques we will be able to create ever-more-compelling obsessions in the virtual world.

Source: Susan Greenfield, Mind Change: How Digital Technologies are Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains (2015)

Excerpts from: “Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the e-Personality“

Elias Aboujaoude (2011)

Dr. Aboujaoude (Preface)

I treated these patients in my Impulse Control Disorders Clinic. Impulse control disorders fall within the obsessive-compulsive spectrum of psychological conditions. They share with OCD repetitive, anxious thoughts that intrude on the person’s mind (the obsession equivalent) and ritualized behaviors that calm the anxiety down (the compulsion equivalent). Unlike OCD, which is never pleasurable, impulse control disorders are often thrilling, even euphoria-inducing in the moment, but lead to much distress and remorse in the long run. While I had some experience diagnosing and treating real-life impulse control disorders, these cases came with a new twist to their age-old problems: Their impulsivity seemed exclusively virtual.

Ashley

Ashley, a sixteen-old ballet student, was brought in by her mother to see me for a consultation. Ashley had already decided to prescribe to herself the antidepressant Wellbutrin, ostensibly for depression, and was on the verge of ordering it online from an overseas supplier when her mother insisted on making the appointment. “I’m sure Wellbutrin would help,” she told her daughter, avoiding a fight that might have made Ashley reluctant to see a doctor. “But let’s at least have a specialist prescribe it. This way we know we’re getting the real thing.”

Ashley’s mother, a medical social worker, had used her maternal and clinical instincts to accurately diagnose her child’s problem: not depression but a serious case of anorexia nervosa that required immediate medical attention. Objective signs for the disorder abounded: the smell of vomit in the bathroom shortly after the family’s meals, the weight loss and accompanying arrest in menstruation, the obsessive calorie counting, and the number of bookmarked nutrition Web sites on the family computer.

It didn’t take long during my first meeting with Ashley to agree with her mother that she was not depressed. Ashley was social, enjoyed ballet, was doing relatively well in school, and smiled broadly when a text message from a friend arrived to her cell phone during the meeting. Yet she quickly blurted out, “Insomnia, poor concentration, poor energy, and anhedonia” in describing to me how she was doing. When I asked her to explain what she meant by anhedonia, a formal clinical term with a Greek pedigree, Ashley grew nervous and impatient. It was obvious that whatever Web site she had consulted to memorize the symptoms of clinical depression apparently did not explain what anhedonia was. (She could have looked up the term on Wikipedia, where it is accurately defined as the “inability to experience pleasure from normally pleasurable life events such as eating, exercise, and social or sexual interaction.”) I told Ashley that given her very low weight Wellbutrin was a poor choice for antidepressant, as it could cause serious seizures in underweight people and might lead to further weight loss. That had little effect on Ashley, however, who threatened to buy the medication on the Web if I did not write her a prescription for something she “knew would work for her.”

Wellbutrin, I had learned from other patients with anorexia, had a reputation in online eating disorders circles for being an appetite suppressant and is commonly sought out by anorexics to help them lose weight. Just as Ashley learned online how to more effectively induce vomiting (“stick the bottom of a toothbrush down your throat, itll all come out,” according to funadvice.com), she also learned how to manipulate her mother and doctor into prescribing the last medication she needed. Still, I did not completely close the door on the possibility of prescribing this medication at some point in the future for Ashley, in part to keep her in my clinic and to encourage her to join an eating disorders therapy group. Unfortunately, Ashley barely lasted for two meetings before the psychologist running the group, a colleague of mine, had to ask her to leave. She could not handle Ashley’s constant defiance and the distorted, partial knowledge clearly gleaned online that Ashley would use to refute every fact the group leader was trying to communicate — how, for instance, the human race did not evolve to eat 2,000 calories a day; how the research showing that the brain of anorexics shrinks as the disease progresses was “seriously flawed” because it “didn’t include a control group” and how most religions of the world have incorporated some element of fasting into their rituals, so how bad can it be.

Liz

Liz, a forty-four-year-old homemaker with no previous psychiatric problems, came to me for help with out-of-control e-tail expenditures. She had heard a radio ad for a clinical trial we were doing at Stanford University to test Celexa, a serotonin-based antidepressant, in the treatment of compulsive shoppers. She hoped she would qualify to be in the study. “For every dress I like, I have to buy three, each in a different color,” she told me at our initial meeting, sounding puzzled at her own behavior. “Then, for each color I get, I have to buy two additional sizes — what if I gain weight, what if I lose weight?” Meanwhile, Liz’s brick-and-mortar shopping habits remained relatively reasonable. She made it a point to tell me how she had just missed the annual Labor Day weekend sale at the big furniture outlet near where she lives — an event she looked forward to year after year. “I didn’t think I could afford it. Not this year. Not with my online spending,” she explained. Then, sounding almost nostalgic for her days of responsible shopping, she added, “I never lost control at a real store the way I lose control online. Until I discovered Buy.com, I was actually putting money aside for retirement. What is it about me?”

Or what is it about the Internet? I encouraged Liz to ask herself this question and to explore how the medium itself might be contributing to her behavior. The idea seemed to resonate. “I guess if it’s online, somehow it doesn’t feel real,” she said. “Or not as real. It’s innocent and fun. Almost guilt-free — just like a computer game. And how bad can a computer game be?” Quite bad, unfortunately, as Liz discovered. Her online shopping sprees had already caused her to file for bankruptcy, which is what finally prompted her to seek help in my clinic. Although her problem was clearly shopping-based, it wasn’t the traditional “compulsive buying disorder” our study was recruiting for. Instead of those crowded modern-day cathedrals we call malls, Liz’s problem manifested itself solely in virtual joints that are always open and where parking is never a problem. Most of our experience with compulsive shopping, and most of what had been described in the psychiatric literature, involved real acquisitions from real stores. Our screening questionnaire for the study, which included questions about the role of in-store advertising, the effect of product display, whether she shopped alone or with friends, and how much effort was involved in getting to her favorite stores — all seemed irrelevant and fell woefully short of “capturing” her problem.

Richard

For Richard, a thirty-six-year-old married Human Resources specialist and father of two, it was the threat of divorce that made him make his first appointment. For years, his gambling habits were what one might call “social,” not remarkably different from what his coworkers would describe in conversations around the water cooler on Monday mornings. Like them, Richard enjoyed the occasional weekend skiing trip to Reno, a three-hour drive from home, where he and his wife would sometimes play the slot machines in their hotel lobby well into the night. Beyond that, however, he never sought it out and never stopped to try his luck at the local Indian casino, despite a couple of memorable wins in Reno that might have served to draw him back to a gaming institution. Simply put, when it came to gambling, Richard could take it or leave it.

A single spam e-mail in his in-box, however, led Richard to a virtual casino that became his undoing. It started with an offer for a free trial of an online Texas Hold ’em game that Richard took advantage of one night when he was having trouble falling asleep. Before long, he was waiting for his wife to go to bed in order to log on, eventually using her credit card to do so after exhausting his promotional account and maxing out his personal credit cards.

Intriguingly, on his morning drive to work, Richard would speed past the Indian casino, counting the minutes till he could get to his desk and log on to his favorite gambling Web site. “It’s a very different experience than being in a real casino,” he explained to me, opening his wallet to show unused coupons he had received from the Reno resort where he had won big. “See, they’re always mailing me offers for a free stay, free meals, free shows,” he said. “None of it seems to move me. Somehow it feels better online. You’re free of inhibitions, whether they’re your own or imposed on you by other people. It’s just you and your computer screen, with no one to disapprove of you or give you dirty looks, and no one to remind you of your responsibilities and your credit card debt.” Richard’s behavior caught up with him when reality, in the form of his wife leaving him with their two kids, encroached on his virtual life.

Raffi

Raffi was a forty-year-old married man who came to see me for what he described as “self-esteem issues.” As the only son of first-generation Italian immigrants, he grew up in a religious household feeling pampered and doted on. The altar boy who did well in school and excelled in sports became a successful civil engineer, marrying his high school sweetheart and forming a family that also included two beautiful teenage daughters. The couple of years before our first appointment, however, had been very trying. Two years ago, at the age of thirteen, one daughter was diagnosed with diabetes. Shortly after that, his beloved mother died unexpectedly of a heart attack. And when the recession hit, Raffi was laid off as part of a restructuring of his company, becoming unemployed for the first time since finishing college. Multiple job interviews had led nowhere.

The string of family and professional losses happening in a relatively short period of time led to clinical depression, which further compounded the situation by taking away Raffi’s energy and his motivation to exercise, eat healthily, and take care of his physical appearance. The once vibrant forty-year-old with the boyish looks and charmed life started seeing himself as fat, unemployable, and all-around worthless.

His wife of fifteen years, still working and as striking and active as when they first fell in love during their senior year, tried to be supportive. In his state of extreme vulnerability and low self-esteem, however, all Raffi could focus on was how she must be having an affair. Not that he had any reason to suspect infidelity: Any extramarital activities his wife partook in seemed to focus on attending diabetes support groups and investigating insulin pumps for her child. But “she has to be having an affair because I have nothing to offer,” went his faulty logic. “Just look at her and look at me.”

About ten years before this, in the “old days,” Raffi might have worked hard to convince himself she wasn’t. He may have sought a “reality check” from a friend or therapist. He may have tried to seek reassurance from his wife that she still loved him and that she would stay by his side until the dark clouds had passed and they were able to go back to their normal lives. If all alternatives failed, he might, out of desperation and as a last resort, decide to hire a private eye. But this was today, a time for shortcuts and immediate results, so Raffi decided to “cut to the chase” and start with the desperate act right away. Only instead of a costly detective, he installed keyloggers on his wife’s laptop.

Keyloggers is a family of easily downloadable, relatively inexpensive software programs that track (or log) the keys struck on a computer keyboard without the person using it knowing that his actions are being monitored. They have some defendable applications: They can be used to control kids’ Internet surfing habits and can help maintain an automatic backup for one’s typed data. Increasingly, however, their main use is as spying tools for people who want to snoop on one another in personal and business affairs — a way to extend one’s knowledge of, and potentially control over, the other person into the virtual realm.

It is now generally accepted that if there is “dirt” to be found in someone’s life, a good place to start looking for it is in that person’s e-mail or text message in-box. Only a clean in-box is proof of a clean record, so Raffi prayed for a chaste log of e-mails that would exonerate his wife. He quickly retrieved her passwords and, for six months, scrutinized her outgoing and incoming messages. He studied her saved contacts and researched the ones he didn’t recognize. He visited every unfamiliar Web site she visited and joined (under a pseudonym) every community she signed up for. But the only real secret he uncovered involved a surprise fortieth birthday party she was planning for him behind his back.

Reassuring himself that no affair was taking place, however, hardly brought him relief. Raffi’s problem may have started with negative-territory self-esteem, but he was now suffering from overwhelming guilt over the sting operation he had conducted against his loving and faithful wife. How could he not trust her, and how did it become so easy for him to turn into a spy? For six whole months, he had spied on a woman who had given him no real reason for doubt. What he had done did not fit the mental image he had of himself, his wife, and his marriage, and Raffi could not forgive himself for it.

Jill and Tom

Fraud should be the last thing that comes to my mind when thinking of my patient Jill, but there is no way around the deceitfulness that marked her foray into online dating. A highly intelligent, always conservatively dressed English teacher, Jill suffered from a severe social anxiety problem that had crippled her romantic life and survived many attempts at medication treatment and psychotherapy. With Jill still celibate at twenty-nine, her previous psychiatrist wisely recommended online dating as a good way to confront the problem. His idea was for her to “break the ice” through a gradual, nonthreatening e-mail and picture exchange, which would ensure that a basic attraction was present and fundamental compatibilities were met. Such an approach would minimize the possibility of rejection or a significant personality clash at the first meeting, along with the overwhelming anxiety this would generate for someone with social phobia. That is how, armed with an online dating service subscription and almost-thirty desperation, Jill finally met Tom.

Actually, Jill sort of met Tom. Her online persona, the one that Tom started courting, was an exalted version of the shy, inhibited woman sitting in my office. For starters, she called herself Tess, changing her name in part to protect confidentiality. However, well beyond the name change, Jill felt a strange pull to embellish, or rather reinvent, other aspects of who she was. Instead of an English teacher — too boring and drab, she thought — Jill became a sales rep who used a combination of natural gregariousness, which she did not possess, and borderline- provocative dress, which I could not imagine her wearing, to convince architects to try the new line of high-end Italian furniture she was promoting. She even intentionally dumbed down her syntax — a sacred cow for her in the classroom — and opted instead to communicate with Tom in simple, declarative sentences and plenty of emoticons. (“They make emotions much easier,” she explained.) Gone from her e-mails, then, was the SAT-style vocabulary she modeled for her students, and in came playful monosyllabic words and truncated forms (cuz for because, pic for picture, u for you, hugz for hugs). Coming across as too brainy was the kiss of death, Jill thought, even if she was communicating with a doctor-in-training like Tom.

This online version of Jill appealed to Tom, and over a six-month e-mail courtship, something that can only be called love (or maybe “luv”) developed between the two: an irrational need to check in with the other on an exhaustingly frequent basis, for no other reason than to make sure the person is still desired with the same intensity expressed in the last e-mail, sent only ten minutes before. Along with this need, of course, came internal restlessness and agitation if the e-mail, text, or instant messaging ping did not arrive when expected. All in all, however, this was thrilling restlessness and agitation, and a completely novel experience that Jill would cherish in her mind as a much delayed first romance, finally.

But then Jill turned thirty, and online love suddenly took on a juvenile air she could no longer tolerate. The cuzes in her e-mails became embarrassments for the schoolteacher, and the lols (for laughing out loud) stopped being funny. Utilizing big, difficult-to-truncate descriptors like “inane” and “asinine,” Jill described to me the discomfort, even shame, that she started feeling with her online love story. She stopped seeing her psychiatrist, saying she was turning into somebody she didn’t recognize under his care, and wanted to start seeing me instead. She still loved Tom, however, and my role was to help her transpose her online relationship into the real world, “because I don’t want to give up who I am.” I tried to explain to her how this was not an easy task, how I had no special psychotherapeutic skills to help her carry it out safely and successfully, and how she should consider going back to her former psychiatrist, who knew her better and who had the right instinct when he recommended online dating, even if she ended up taking it too far — but Jill would not listen or reason. She was a woman in virtual love.

As I quickly found out, what stoked Jill’s anxiety even more than entering the fourth decade of life was that, several months into their courtship, Tom was not insisting on meeting in person. Jill had enough insight into her psychology to realize how, in many ways, this had been the perfect relationship for her, providing an outlet for libidinal energy without the unbearable stress of social performance and interpersonal contact. But why wasn’t Tom more persistent? What was his problem? This question plagued Jill and, more than any other consideration, made her insist on the fateful meeting. Despite his cold feet and her untruths, she was still intent on trying to bring her virtual romance to a smooth landing in the real world, and I was to help her navigate this emotional minefield.

Where to meet, what to wear, and in what order to begin correcting the many fallacies that separated Jill from Tess? My patient struggled mightily with these questions as she prepared to meet her online love. As it turned out, however, she needn’t have worried at all. Or, perhaps more accurately, she should have been doubly worried, for Tom had a few secrets of his own to confess. For starters, he was really Ted, and the doctor Jill thought she had landed was a pharmacist who had always wanted to go to medical school. The two were playing the same game: Jill was increasing her appeal by pretending to be less socially inhibited, and Tom was increasing his by elevating himself on the socioeconomic and alpha male ladder. Somewhere in cyberspace their trajectories collided, with much potential and heartache resulting.

Yet, far from con artists, Tom and Jill were using the virtual world to overcome limitations that they felt were unjust, and both were helpless in front of a game that had self-perpetuating, snowballing tendencies built into it — and real rewards associated with it, too. For, regardless of how we might judge it and regardless of the outcome, it would be impossible to deny the intensity, even the genuineness, of the pleasurable, ego-boosting emotions/emoticons that the Internet helped generate between “Tess” and “Tom,” whoever they really were.

For them, the face-to-face meeting must have been a terrifying reminder of all the old anxieties, inhibitions, and “baggage” that they were able to ignore for a long while online — a reminder of what mere mortals they still were. In its ultimate philosophical interpretation, this confrontation with reality was a brutal reminder of death itself, the devastating death of an ideal personality that they wished they had — freer, sexier and, in their eyes, more worthy of being loved than the one they were stuck with in real life. And neither he nor she could tolerate it. According to Jill, the meeting ended with the couple, having shared a string of disappointing revelations, separately leaving the café where they had met, having decided not to pursue a relationship that was too burdened by lies to have a true chance at success. That evening, they logged on from their home computers, found each other online, chatted briefly, then found a reason to log off. From what I could glean, it was a perfectly pleasant but superficial IM exchange, devoid of “blame game”–type accusations, but also of any big love pronouncements. They would not, the following day, obsessively check e-mail to see if the other person had sent a sweet note.

DURING CLASS:

1. Current events

Discussion leader: Robert

2. Lesson work

Assigned reading/video discussion leader: A
Online discussion leader: B
Links library discussion leader: C

3. Digerati: Elias Aboujaoude

Activity leader: D

Elias Aboujaoude is a psychiatrist and author based at the Stanford University School of Medicine, where he is Director of the Impulse Control Disorders Clinic and the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Clinic. His research interest has focused on obsessive compulsive disorder and behavioral addictions, including problematic Internet use.

In-class reading (click here for a copy) excerpted from: “Hobbes vs. Rosseau”, William Saletan, NYT book review of Dr. Elias Aboujaoude’s book “Virtually You” and Jane McGonigal’s “Reality is Broken” (2011)

In-class video: Brian Lehrer interviews Dr. Elias Aboujaoude (WYNC Radio, 2014)

4. Preview

Preview homework for class 25: Thu Dec 22

Homework
Classroom leadership assignments