Anthropologist Tanja Ahlin on The Conversation on "digital addiction"
There is little doubt that social media can be addictive. Just last month, Meta settled a case alleging that it had deliberately made its platforms addictive to children. But from what perspective should we try to understand different technologies?
Social media and addiction to it are often compared to addiction to alcohol, tobacco or drugs, but according to anthropologists Tanja Ahlin and Xin Zhan, this can be misleading. As they explain in their recent article in The Conversation, digital technologies are not simply things we consume.
'Digital devices have become a kind of essential infrastructure for daily life. Given how we have built our lives around them, these technologies are now very difficult to live without.’
This means that simply trying to ‘quit’ smartphones or social media may not be a realistic solution. Instead, we need to ask how we can build a more sustainable relationship with technologies 'that are both indispensable and potentially harmful'.