All About Addiction

I work in social media so I sitting here smiling. I think you misunderstand the internet. It was simply invented by physicists to cobble together computing power around the world and then taken over by the military because of its self-healing properties. Academics colonized it later and of course Gen Y after that.

The two properties of sharing computing power and its self-healing properties are the two that are key for work & organizational psychologists. If you google Hagel and Davos, you will pick up an article describing the motor cycle industry in China. From here we get an idea of competing with supply chains (rather than individual firms). The supply chain isn't dictated to by one firm. Each node thinks for itself and helps imagine the resulting product such like a bird in a flock (boids). The self-healing comes about because if one firm drops out, the chain is not broken; it self heals.

It's easiest to understand self-healing with the technology of 100 dollar computers. They speak to each other, and look for each other, instead of taking to the grid. We track zebra herds the same way (zebra to zebra - no internet on the savannah) and emergency vehicles are able to heal their networks the same way.

There are huge implications for social relations and as the 'sociology' changes, so will the context for psychology. Our understanding of organization changes. Our understanding of cooperation changes. Our sense of what is possible changes.

Gaming is different. Google know Jane McGonigle. Look maybe at her presentation at SxSw in 2008 I think. All work and organizational psychologists will wince. She and other gamers are using psychology to make interactive real time games for millions of people using psychology. If we did that too, a lot fewer people would be mentally ill.

There may be people who get "addicted" to the internet. There is a much bigger group who doesn't get collaboration and distributed decision making. Work with them rather. Industries are changing to these distributed models, or collapsing. Compare Boeing and newspapers, for example. If people can't/won't grasp the essence of these changes, they will be very painful for them indeed.

I appreciate the lesson in distributed networks and their power. I study addictions so I'll continue focusing on that. You should feel free to work with people who "don't get collaboration and distributed decision making." Good luck.