Leah Libresco has a post about monitoring her \u201caddictions\u201d during Lent<\/a>: the activities that seem to suck up her time, to verify that they value actual value and aren\u2019t simply sucking her into a dopamine loop. I was reminded of experiments I\u2019ve read about, done on rats. <\/p>\nPut a rat in a cage with a button. If the rat pushes the button, he gets food. Rats given this option often keep pushing the button. But if you make it so that the button only sometimes provides food, the rats push the button even more often. The occasional reward becomes even more of a compulsion.<\/p>\n
Some games remind me of this (everyone remember Farmville?); but even more than that, Facebook reminds me of this. How often do I click that link on my bookmark bar that brings up Facebook, in the hope that somebody I know has \u201clikes\u201d something I\u2019ve written, or has capped some witty remark that I\u2019ve made? It\u2019s the same thing as the rat. The rat gets food, sometimes; I get ego gratification sometimes. And it truly is, in some sense, addicting. <\/p>\n
I came back to Facebook after a long absence as a way of keeping up with the other Patheos bloggers; and for that it has been very good and a real blessing. But I find that over the last few months I\u2019ve been spending way too much time looking at it, and that it\u2019s distracting me from other things. I\u2019m having trouble focussing on a book, or a conversation, or a train of thought for long; I keep wanting to go press the button and see what\u2019s new. I\u2019m spending more time looking at links, but less time actually reading the linked blog posts. I\u2019m becoming scattered, distracted, and superficial.<\/p>\n
Ugh. This is very much not good.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not sure what steps I\u2019m going to take; but it\u2019s clear that Facebook is a good servant but a poor master. I\u2019ve got to learn to keep it in its place.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Leah Libresco has a post about monitoring her \u201caddictions\u201d during Lent: the activities that seem to suck up her time, to verify that they value actual value and aren\u2019t simply sucking her into a dopamine loop. I was reminded of experiments I\u2019ve read about, done on rats. Put a rat in a cage with a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1131,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,18],"tags":[303,302,301],"class_list":["post-1531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christian-living","category-links-to-this-and-that","tag-addiction","tag-facebook","tag-farmville"],"yoast_head":"\n
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