You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In her new book, Internet Addiction: A Critical Psychology of Users (Routledge, 2021), Emaline Friedman takes on an enormous and weighty task. She enlists the concept of Internet addiction, which has gained currency since the participatory platforms that emerged in the 1990s, to reframe questions about user/platform interfaces and their pathogenic effects. Beginning with a critique of addiction models, Friedman pulls back the curtain of digital platform technology to expose the seeming magic behind the act. She brings considerable technical expertise to this task of demystifying the Internet, the functionalities behind social media platforms, and how they run on programmed algorithms, enlisting the tools of her multiple trades in this project. Friedman is a psychoanalytic theorist, researcher, and former editor of the online journal Mad in America: Science and Technology, and she writes about distributed software and potential remedies for some of the abuses she takes up in her book. She enlists the concept of schizoanalysis, advanced by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and French psychoanalyst and activist Félix Guattari, to explain how the subjectivity of Internet users is shaped by the material conditions that drive the commercial expansion of capitalism and the labor process itself though the web.
Internet Addiction is not based on a psychological study of actual users, nor does Friedman present interview material or clinical data. This is an analysis of user/Internet interfaces grounded in psychoanalytic cultural theory and critical psychology – an interdisciplinary field that includes attentiveness to the ideological premises of the psychology profession and related fields, often termed “the psy complex.” In her critical psychology, Friedman approaches Internet addiction as a concept that forecloses on engagement with troubling aspects of digital technologies that warrant genuine public concern, arguing that “this grafting onto the Internet the diagnostic