Adam Alter: Tech Addiction or Healthy Obsession?
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 1 May 2017
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How do you know if you're addicted to your phone? Or maybe your favorite game, app, text, snapchat, Instagram, Facebook or online shopping?
Is it even possible to be truly addicted to these things? You know, like on the level of drugs? Or are we all just being a bit too alarmist?
Where is the line between a healthy obsession that adds to your life and an addiction to tech that can own and potentially destroy you?
Today's guest, NYU professor, Adam Alter, gives us a massive reality check. He breaks down the different between passions, obsessions and straight-up addictions, splits apart chemical and behavioral addictions and shows how technology is being specifically designed to get and keep us hooked.
Alter also offers some powerful tools to better understand when technology is owning us, rather than the other way around, then show how to reclaim the power in the relationship.
His new book, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, is a powerful look at how we interact with technology and how it is being designed to create relentless behavioral addiction that can become nearly impossible to break.
For more on Adam's "back story," be sure to check out our 2013 conversation on how hidden influences control your life.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Even if you are the most extroverted, boystress, lovely person that everyone around you |
| 0:07.6 | wants to be you all the time, you will have moments when you are lonely. |
| 0:12.0 | And the thing is, in the past, those moments you worked through, you accepted it, you dealt |
| 0:16.4 | with it, we were all lonely at some point in our lives and we got through. |
| 0:20.2 | You don't need to do that anymore. |
| 0:21.8 | What you do the minute you have that pang of loneliness, and again, this is everyone |
| 0:25.2 | at some point in time is you pick up a device and it makes you no longer lonely. |
| 0:32.2 | Today's guest, Adam Alter, has been on the show in the past. |
| 0:36.6 | Back in the day when we were filming, you may have seen the episode and heard his awesome |
| 0:42.9 | backstory. |
| 0:44.1 | If you want to know a lot more about his journey, check out that episode. |
| 0:47.2 | We'll drop a link in the show notes. |
| 0:49.1 | Adam is a professor at NYU and he studies human behavior, why we do what we do. |
| 0:55.1 | He's got a new book out called Irresistible, the rise of addictive technology and the |
| 1:00.3 | business of keeping us hooked. |
| 1:03.5 | And we go deep into this, into the idea of addiction, substance versus behavioral, how |
| 1:08.7 | our environment really influences everything. |
| 1:10.9 | There's a lot of really eye-opening wisdom and surprising wisdom about this. |
| 1:17.3 | And then we move over to the world of technology. |
| 1:22.2 | And what is doing two and four of us, the conversation is different than conversations |
| 1:26.1 | that we've shared in the past. |
| 1:27.7 | We also kind of go down the rabbit hole of virtual reality a bit also. |
... |
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