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Should Addictive Tech Come With a Health Warning?
holy_calamity writes "Academics researching how technology addiction affects businesses and employees say 'habit-forming' gadgets like Blackberries should be dispensed along with warnings about the effect they can have on your life. 'We don't want to be in a situation in a few years similar to that with fast food or tobacco today. We need to pay attention to how people react to potentially habit-forming technologies.'"
Oh please, big government, save us from ourselves by outlawing more things! We don't need to be personally accountable for our own actions!
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
As long as doing something (gaming, gambling, alcohol, drugs) potentiates the production of dopamine, then it has the potential to cause addiction.
Doing things you enjoy are fun, usually when you're having fun dopamine levels rise significantly in your brain.
Dopamine is commonly associated with the pleasure system of the brain, providing feelings of enjoyment and reinforcement to motivate a person proactively to perform certain activities.
No kidding! What would such a warning label look like?
Surgeon General's Warning: The likelihood of a psychological addiction to this device is approximately equal to your own tendency to become psychologically addicted to stuff.
I work in a place where they hand out blackberries like they're candy on Halloween. IMHO, people don't get 'addicted' to their blackberries, they become addicted to making it look like they're doing something important. Either way it's pathetic, and no warning label will fix it.
Take off every 'sig' for great justice.
Why should a government treat its citizens like adults when marketers, entertainers, and the citizens themselves don't? The idea that people are inherently rational and can't be swayed by clever psychology is one of the biggest delusions in the modern world.
However evil and corrupt corporations are, they don't have the right to bust down my door at 2am and kill me or (if I'm lucky) drag me away to spend the rest of my life in a small cement room.
Libertarian types get really hung up on institutionalized violence, but I don't think they've made the case that physical oppression is really any worse than emotional oppression. There are many things that can fuck you up *much* worse than being locked in a small cement room. If you try, I bet you can think of many things that you would happily go to jail to prevent -- how about your little sister becoming anorexic? Or a dear friend becoming a junkie and spiraling down into suicide? Now here's the real question -- are those personal choices, or the result of the actions of other people? The reality is that it's mixed. Nobody decides in advance that they're going to have an eating disorder or get addicted to drugs or elevate their blood pressure by checking email all day and night. It takes one step at a time, and often those steps are encouraged by organized groups that take advantage of quirks of human behavior to make money. No individual has the resources to keep up with that all of the time. I agree that government regulation is far from ideal, but it does act as a counterweight to corporate abuse, and I think the claim that we don't need that is based on an unrealistic view of how people work.
So to answer your earlier statement, does the government know better than me? About some things, no, but about a whole hell of a lot of things, yes. I'm one person; it's made up of millions.
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