Introduction

• Published in: Internet Addiction pp. 1 - 10
• Main Author: Friedman, Emaline
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2021
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: Psychological Institutions; Internet Addiction; Company Ipo; Social Media Companies; Collective Individuation; Internet Addicts; Brain's Pleasure Centers; Social Reproduction; Ipo; Addiction Neuroscience; Internet Gambling; Slot Machine Players; Cocaine Addiction; Excessive Internet; Facebook Addiction; Continuous Partial Attention; NBC; Specific Internet Activities; Insurgent Universality; Brain Disease Model; Critical Psychology; Extreme Social Exclusion; Smart Act; Civilizing Technolog
• ISBN: 9780367172916; 9780367172954; 036717295X; 0367172917
• DOI: 10.4324/9780429056055-1

This introduction to Internet Addiction: A Critical Psychology of Users presents the major concerns of the book: the trans-disciplinary and popular interest in excessive Internet use, and the inadequacy of psychology's legacy "addiction" paradigm for addressing it. It introduces Deleuze and Guattari's (1986, 1987) schizoanalytic methodology used in the rest of the piece to provide theoretical reflections on the social necessity of excessive Internet use and to map the "digital social body." The latter supports a schematic understanding of the meaning of Internet excesses according to the social stratifications of the digital social body, its appropriation of human sociality, and its management of desire. This critical psychology of users aims to collectivize "Internet Addiction," moving it from the psychological context of pathological individuals and situating the ubiquity of net-connected, social media within the inequities of global capitalism, its technologies of control, and modes of valorization.