The social diagnoses of digital addictions: Technophobic ambivalences, the limits of the natural and imperatives of self‐governance in the information age

Abstract

AbstractThe contemporary visibility of ‘digital addictions’ to online gaming, watching pornography, social media and so on suggests the discovery of some new form of technologically facilitated disease. Yet, what we actually see in the symptoms of these various behaviours when described as ‘addictions’ are a series of social problems that range from the interpersonal to the sociocultural. In the current article, I work to step outside of the individualising tendency of an addiction taxonomy to instead view digital addictions as a process of social diagnosis. In this way, digital addictions are understood as a reaction to historically and socioculturally informed forces. Specifically, I contend that a social diagnosis of the digital addiction concept tells us a great deal about contemporary cultural anxiety towards the ubiquity of digital media in our social worlds as it rubs up against concerns for productivity, socially lauded ideas of ostensibly ‘natural’ behaviours and worries about self‐governance and self‐control. I conclude with a series of pertinent questions about digital technologies, which are elided—if not actively foreclosed—within an addiction framework and which can better be made sense of by understanding digital addictions as a process of social diagnosis rather than the expression of a new kind of Internet borne illness.