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Caught in the Net – The Internet & Compulsion

Posted by dlende on May 28, 2009

Internet Evolution
By Emily Salvaterra, KT Hanson, Gonzalo Brenner, Hannah Jackson

Why are you reading this? Do you want to learn? Are you doing research? Maybe you’re bored and are looking to kill time? Are you addicted and can’t get offline?

So just how many of those links did you check out? After clicking on the first one, did you want to click on another? Did you fight the urge or just keep clicking?

How Much is Too Much? When a Habit Goes Too Far
World in Hand
Almost 25% of the people in the world are active Internet users. More than 100 million Facebook users log on at least once per day. Nine blogs are created each minute. As advancements in Internet technology continue to make the world smaller and smaller, new users are plugging into the Net at an unbelievable pace. But what happens when these users are logging on too often? Where do you draw the line between harmless and harmful?

Many experts today are asking these questions about Internet usage. The Internet can be a valuable tool for accessing information, making connections, and maintaining relationships. People all over the world use their cell phones, laptops, and home computers to access the Internet and branch out in all directions on the information superhighway. But for some, one wrong turn changes the Internet from a mode of communication to a medium of compulsion.

The Process of Escalation

Remember what your life was like without the Internet? We don’t. And we don’t particularly want to imagine life without it either. Today we live in a fast-paced technology-loving age where the answers to most any question are just a mouse click away. Unfortunately, this is just part of the problem when it comes to Internet addiction.

Over the years, the Internet has become too stimulating, too accessible, too anonymous, and too interactive. To put it simply, it’s way too easy to get sucked into the Internet. For some people, an everyday habit of checking Facebook on your new BlackBerry (a.k.a. CrackBerry) can turn into a full-blown compulsion in a matter of weeks.

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Posted in Addiction, Technology | 7 Comments »

Tobacco Worse Than Cocaine?

Posted by dlende on May 27, 2009

Gas Deal
By Mariana Cuervo, Elizabeth Montana, Brian Smith, and Sadie Pitzenberger

Is your local gas station attendant a drug dealer? Most people would say no, yet he readily deals all day long with customers looking for their next nicotine fix. Nicotine, the addictive substance in tobacco, keeps its users hooked.

Even though most people do not consider tobacco to be a drug, this post will show that it is exactly that. Tobacco delivers similar neurobiological effects as illegal substances like cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana, all more commonly associated with the word “drug.” With tobacco, however, advertising and the law contribute to the common perception that tobacco is not a drug.

Tobacco Products

Just like on the street corner, where you might be able to buy crack, marijuana or meth, a gas station offers different types of drugs. Tobacco itself comes in many forms: dip, snuff, cigars and, of course cigarettes.

Chewing tobacco or “dip” is a smokeless form of tobacco, which when packed into the lip allows nicotine to flow into the bloodstream via the gum line. Snuff, a finer form of tobacco, is snorted while cigarettes are smoked. Both provide an alternative way to get a nicotine high.

The ways in which these tobacco products are consumed mirror the techniques of cocaine consumption – coca leaves are chewed, cocaine is snorted, and crack is smoked. So how is tobacco different?
Cigarette Poisons
And just like marijuana tobacco is grown in the ground, picked and dried, and then rolled into cigars and cigarettes. Tobacco has nicotine while marijuana has tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Both are responsible for getting the user high.

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Posted in Addiction, Applied Anthropology, Medical anthropology | 12 Comments »

What’s the Dope on Music and Drugs?

Posted by dlende on May 26, 2009

Record Player
But in the long run these drugs are probably gonna catch up sooner or later
But fuck it I’m on one, so let’s enjoy,
let that X destroy your spinal chord, so it’s not a straight line no more
So we walk around lookin like some wind-up dolls,
shit stickin out of our backs like a dinosaur,
Shit, six hit’s won’t even get me high no more,
so bye for now, I’m gonna try to find some more

- Eminem, Drug Ballad

Drug strewn lyrics and references are found in much of today’s popular music. What effect do these words have on the average listener? Would you let your 10 year old listen to this? Why not… they’re just lyrics right?

School House Rock: Monkey Hear, Monkey Do?
John Markert: Two Schools of Thought

1) Reflection Theory : “Music is popular because it reflects the values and beliefs of those who consume it.” Proponents of Reflection Theory examine cultural forms such as music lyrics to gain insight into social beliefs. Here music is used to probe the connection between society and culture. Supporters of this intellectual tradition see the audience consuming with a critical eye, selecting songs because the theme relate to them and their world.
Woodstock
2) Arnoldian Theory : “Music is didactic and acts as a socializing agent by teaching behavior.” The concern by those at the other end of the intellectual tradition is that song lyrics may teach inappropriate social behavior. Mathew Arnold laid the foundation for this perspective in the last century, and his initial assessment continues to remain popular.

This is where the real debate can begin. Are the music and lyrics of songs with drug, alcohol, sex, and violence references putting adolescents at a greater risk of alcohol and drug use? Or is it simply the culture that these songs and music are created and engulfed in?

Pros and Cons of the Two Schools

One can make a case for both opposing ideologies. On the one hand, it is easy to see how the music and general lyrics can influence adolescents into using drugs and alcohol. For example, when browsing for songs that contain any type of alcohol or drug reference it is not hard to find hundreds of songs that contain one if not both. “White Lines”, “Fight for Your Right to Light the Bong,” and “Crack Monster” are just a few of the songs that diminish the dangers and actually commemorate the use of drugs and alcohol.

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Posted in Addiction, Cultural theory, Learning | 6 Comments »

Gambling and Compulsion: Neurobiology Meets Casinos

Posted by dlende on May 23, 2009

Slot MachinesBy Jarred Carter, Andrew Cavanagh, Elizabeth Olveda, and Meredith Ragany

Vegas baby, Vegas!

So you’ve finally made it out to Sin City, setting aside a few hundreds dollars to gamble. Maybe even a thousand. You’re hoping to get lucky and have some fun. A few hours and a half-dozen drinks into your weekend, you find yourself at the craps table, dice in hand. You’re feeling good, ready to turn your recent down streak into big bucks. Where does that leave you?
Right where the casino wants you.

The game is rigged. Everyone loses money eventually, if not immediately. But just like gamblers grab hold of that lever and pull, society has stepped up to the gambling craze. And now gambling is pulling people for all they’re worth: emotionally, mentally and, most notably, financially.

This post will look more closely at casino’s techniques to draw gamblers back to the slot chairs and the tables, focusing on both physiological aspects and engaged decision making. Ultimately, these observations will demonstrate that casinos create more than entertainment; they develop an entire compulsive experience.

The Gambler’s Rush

The casino’s greatest asset might be the very personal, very intense rush that gamblers experience as they step up to the blackjack table or slot machine, hoping to strike it rich. This characteristic “rush” or “high” stems from the series of steps and actions that are involved in addictive behavior. Stimulation from the surrounding atmosphere and the thrill of a big risk drives the “high”. Ultimately, the “rush” from gambling can be as intense as a drug fix.

Dealing Emotions

Excitement, making a quick buck, or even the possibility of financial independence is enticing. From experience, most people know that emotions are difficult to control. From a neurological standpoint, the amygdala is situated in the limbic system and is one main centers of emotion (pdf) in the human brain. Other parts of the brain, like the prefontal cortex, display less activity (pdf) during the act of gambling.

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Posted in Addiction, Brain imaging, Brain Mechanisms, Decision Making, Psychological anthropology | 3 Comments »

Why Do They Do It? Portrayals of Alcohol on Facebook and MySpace

Posted by dlende on May 22, 2009

“I’m so much cooler online…Yeah I’m cooler online…”
– Brad Paisley, Online

By David Patterson, Elizabeth Kuzmich, Francis Verhaegen, and Natalie Leopold
Facebook Cheer
Why do they do it? Why do otherwise smart and savvy college and high school student post photos of themselves drinking and partying on Facebook and MySpace? To the right is just one. There are many more, some of them a lot more, um… revealing than this one.

Facebook/MySpace and the pictures posted on these websites represent a microcosm of social life. It is true that college students drink more often and in higher quantities than any other age group. Their lives include class, work, homework, club meetings…and partying. Many times, pictures of fraternity parties and keggers do not portray college students accurately. In other words, these students choose to portray only certain aspects of their lives on the Internet.

Thus, the pictures posted on Facebook/MySpace only represent some of these activities, specifically partying. For the same reason that website profiles of older adults often feature their wives and children, the profiles of college students feature what they believe is the most interesting, or ‘coolest,’ part of their life – having fun while partying and drinking.

Pictures of drinking and partying are interesting to their peers. The college social scene revolves around attending bars and fraternity parties. Just as the public looks to celebrities for cues on what to wear, where to go, and how to act, young adults look to their peers to see what are the best parties and activities, which are illustrated on Facebook/MySpace. It is unlikely that a college student would post a picture of himself or herself in the library or working at the ice cream shop.

Facebook/MySpace allows for the creation of new or altered identity and the presentation of this identity to others. Individuals can portray themselves as social, attractive, and popular by posting pictures of themselves surrounded by friends at a party. In theory, this makes them more desirable to the other sex and ‘cooler’ to their peers.

Examining the Profiles

In order to take a closer look at the prevalence of alcohol-related pictures in Facebook and MySpace profiles, 25 Facebook profiles and 25 MySpace profiles were randomly selected from a large pool of male and female individuals using a random numbers generator. The users’ ages varied from 17 to 25, essentially the average aged college students. From these profiles, the photo albums were inspected to determine whether they were alcohol or party related. Pictures containing beer cans, bottles, or handles of liquor or those taken in a bar or party setting or other miscellaneous drinking activities counted towards an “alcohol-related” picture or photo album.

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Posted in Addiction | 9 Comments »

Student Posts Coming

Posted by dlende on May 22, 2009

Just like last year, groups of students from my class Alcohol and Drugs: The Anthropology of Substance Use and Abuse have put together some great posts to share with the world. This year had more of a compulsion and culture theme, looking at “addictions” in areas besides drugs and alcohol as well as the impact of music and the internet on our everyday involvements. I’ll put the first post up later today, and then go more-or-less one a day until I get through all nine.

The posts represent quality work by the students. The students developed their own arguments and ideas, and did the background research themselves. I don’t always agree with them, and that’s good – all part of academic discourse.

Last year’s posts proved very popular. The one on brain imaging is in our Top Ten overall, and another on the genetic and environmental bases of addiction is in the top twenty. All told, the eight posts have been read more than 13,000 times!

The students covered a range of topics last year, from post-conventional outlaws and the drug war to college binge drinking and gender, stress and addiction and inequality and addiction, and finally on denial and disease and on age limits on drinking.

To see all of last’s years posts, check out Why A Final Essay When We Can Do This?

Posted in Addiction | 1 Comment »

The Insidious, Elusive Becoming: Addiction in Four Steps

Posted by dlende on March 10, 2009

bowline_in_four_steps

Trying to describe the process of becoming an alcoholic is like trying to describe air. It’s too big and mysterious and pervasive to be defined… [T]here is no simple reason it happens, no single moment, no physiological event that pushes a heavy drinker across a concrete line into alcoholism. It’s a slow, gradual, insidious, elusive becoming.

-Caroline Knapp

Caroline Knapp wrote those lines near the beginning of her powerful memoir Drinking: A Love Story. Every year I use this book in my class on addiction. Students get drawn into Knapp’s clear and close account of how she began to drink so much, what it is like to be an alcoholic, and how she managed to get to recovery. Every year the book challenges my own thinking as well.

I used that last line—alcoholism as a slow, gradual, insidious, elusive becoming—to end my earlier post on Subjectivity and Addiction: Moving Beyond Just the Disease Model. There I argued that our two views of addiction, a popular one of getting hooked on things and a serious one about tolerance and destructive use, are crucial to understanding what addiction is.

For each category my class stuck up exemplars on the blackboard, from Facebook to hard-core drugs. Then I drew a ↔ between the two categories, using a thick two-headed arrow to indicate that the subjective and biological views interact. Both sides matter.

But I’ve realized that is not enough. That double-sided arrow remains woefully inadequate, a place marker that can end being two-faced, saying nothing of consequence, or double-edged, used simply to cut into the other side. That one symbol tells us little about the interactions themselves, about how people and disease mesh. It lends no insight into what Knapp shows us with her book—that addiction is an elusive and terrible becoming.

So how do you become an alcoholic or addict? How do you go from something fun to something all-encompassing? This question matters deeply. One fact, often overlooked in all the moral angst about addiction, is that most people who try alcohol or drugs do not end up addicted to them. They remain on the popular side. But some cross over. In the same passage as the opening quote, Knapp describes the end point: “Alcohol is everywhere in your life, omnipresent, and you’re both aware and unaware of it almost all the time; all you know is you’d die without it, and there is no simple reason why this happens… (8)”

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Posted in Addiction, Learning, Medical anthropology, Psychological anthropology | 5 Comments »

One Day at Kotaku: Understanding Video Games and Other Modern Obsessions

Posted by dlende on January 19, 2009

kotakuKotaku is a gaming site, full of news, opinion, and lots of readers’ comments. People hooked on video games go there for a steady stream of stories from around the world. On this particular day, January 12th, a range of pieces captured why the video game phenomenon has so much to tell us about our modern obsessions, from sex to shopping, drugs to drinking. These eight stories show us the powerful convergence of people looking for fun and industries looking for profit. From pleasure to despair, this convergence is the story of our post-modern lives. It’s not commodities anymore, it’s activities.

Why not start off with an aircraft carrier? Golden Tee Joins the Navy, Ships Out on Supercarrier covers how Lieutenant Mike Hall wrote to Incredible Technologies, the manufacturer of the popular arcade golf game, “about his love of the game and his longing to play it while at sea.” Incredible Technologies donated the game, the Navy invited the company to the USS John C Stennis to “see just how important the machine will be to recreational life at sea.” A rather straight-forward feel-good story. It’s where most of us live our lives, including the 5000 crew members who can now golf at sea.

The next one, One Man Zelda Band, shows how video games inspire a cultural genre of creativity, how these activities becomes more than a game and move onto artistry, meaning, and, in this case, some inspired music from the composer and gamer Diwa De Leon. But still, in this video we’re talking about a real obsession. Think of the time and effort that went into this production!

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Posted in Addiction, Video Games | 6 Comments »

Subjectivity and Addiction: Moving Beyond Just the Disease Model

Posted by dlende on January 17, 2009

By Daniel Lende

This week when students in my Alcohol and Drugs class spoke of their obessions, of MySpace and gambling and television and text messaging, they easily acknowledged their own subjectivity. Winning big, losing big; getting away from reality; having fun; becoming wrapped up in whatever particular compulsion is their own – they spoke of what it meant to them, why they did it, what sorts of feelings and experiences characterized that activity.

On Thursday I started class by asking them to write down their own definition of addiction. Unlike the descriptions of their own activities, there was a marked move towards a more causal and biological framework: “dependence” was the first word that came out of one small group discussion. Uncontrollable, using to fulfill a need, both physical and psychological, a disease – these were all other ways to characterize addiction.

Obsession did appear as well, the only clear link to a subsequent discussion on the popular sense of addiction, of what people mean whey they say they are addicted to Facebook, to a favorite food, to a friend or lover. “Need” came up too, but more as an afterthought, a recognition that sometimes their popular obsessions get too strong a hold on their everyday lives.

After discussing these two senses of addiction, as a problem and a type of involvement, we turned to looking at how the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV (DSM-IV) defines substance abuse and substance dependence. These are the guidelines that health professionals use to diagnose mental health problems.

For abuse, oddly defined as being the lesser problem, some of the main criteria include: “Recurrent substance use resulting in a failure to fulfill major role obligations,” “Recurrent substance-related legal problems,” and “Continued substance use despite having persistent or recurrent social or interpersonal problems.”

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Posted in Addiction | 2 Comments »

Studying Sin

Posted by dlende on November 8, 2008

By Daniel Lende

“You study sin,” my dinner companion said with a smile at a recent conference. I reached for my wine, and after a modest sip (really!), replied, “Vicio. In Colombia it’s called vicio. Vices.”

In Colombia vicio covers a whole range of activities—video games, playing pool, and yes, drugs. Even better, when vicio becomes the adjective “enviciador,” favorite snacks and sweets come into the picture. People start to eat, and it’s hard to stop until every piece of candy is gone.

I like the Colombian category of vicio, because I see something common in the way people get hooked on things, the way they want and crave this or that. I have seen it with food, with sex, with gambling and smoking cigarettes in both the United States and Colombia. But I have seen “getting hooked” best with drugs.

In today’s world drugs stand in for sin pretty well. Just in April Pope Benedict XVI declared drug use a deadly sin. In the United States drug users are often seen as moral degenerates. In this moral model of addiction, people lack willpower. As the tagline to a recent HBO series on addiction went, Why can’t they just stop?

But with addiction, the disease model has slowly come to the fore, highlighted by Alan Leshner, the then-head of the National Institute of Drugs Abuse, declaring in Science that “Addiction Is a Brain Disease, and It Matters.”

Morals versus brains. Or culture versus biology. Just yesterday in a talk someone asked about gender, “So is this biology or is this culture?”

How can we escape this constricting dichotomy? As I discussed in an interview with Jonah Lehrer over at Scientific American’s Mind Matters, I think a focus on concrete problems is the way to go. Specifics will help get us to where we need to go, not theories based on old ideas.

Indeed, grand pronouncements of consilience or some over-arching theory forget about Newton and his very concrete apple. As the poet Lord Byron wrote:

When Newton saw an apple fall, he found
In that slight startle from his contemplation –
‘Tis said (for I’ll not answer above ground
For any sage’s creed or calculation) –
A mode of proving that the earth turn’d round
In a most natural whirl, called “gravitation;”
And this is the sole mortal who could grapple,
Since Adam, with a fall or with an apple.

Today we’ve got the physics of an apple down, and we are turning back to the problem facing Adam. The tree of knowledge is both tempting and sweet. So just how are we to understand the apple of my eye?

Translation

My concrete problem has been craving, that compulsive desire drug users can experience and which plays such a powerful role in relapse in excessive use and relapse. In both the popular accounts and scientific literature on addiction, dopamine often takes the blame for addiction. In understanding dopamine function, two prominent ways have been developed over the past decade – one focused on incentives and motivation, and the other on computation and learning. With addiction, the incentives and motivation approach has gained more traction, largely through the “incentive salience” work of Terry Robinson and Kent Berridge. Robinson and Berridge have often glossed dopamine function as “wanting” – and wanting just needs a little push to get to craving.

Their elegant work and sophisticated hypothesis testing have helped tease out a particularly thorny problem around addiction, that of pleasure versus desire. Earlier behaviorist theories largely assumed that pleasure was the ultimate reinforcer; no other mechanism was necessary to account for why animals went towards something rewarding. The work by Robinson and Berridge helped separate “wanting” versus “liking,” or as I explain to my students, the difference between that late-night craving for pizza, just a phone dial away, and that first exquisite bite of cheese and sauce and dough.

So the leap from lab to real life can be perilous. It’s a leap that I think anthropologists are better equipped to make than most. For my research on compulsive wanting and craving, what really made the difference was the combination of two strange bedfellows – evolution and ethnography. While for many that combination would be sinful in itself, the two helped take research on dopamine function and translate it into something I could use.

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Posted in Addiction, Brain Mechanisms, Decision Making, Psychological anthropology | 12 Comments »

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