Internet Addiction A Critical Psychology of Users Concepts for Critical Psychology Series

This essential book questions the psychological construct ofInternet Addiction by contextualizing it within the digital technological era. It proposes a critical psychology that investigates user subjectivity as a function of capitalism and imperialism, arguing against punitive models of digital excesses and critiquing the political economy of the Internet affecting all users.

Friedman explores the limitations of individual-centered remediations exemplified in the psychology of internet addiction. Furthermore, Friedman outlines the self-creative actions of social media users, and the data processing that exploits them to urge psychologists to politicize rather than pathologize the effects of excessive net use. The book develops a notion of capitalist imperialism of the social web and studies this using the radical methods of philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari.

By synthesizing perspectives on digital life from sociology, economics, digital media theory, and technology studies for psychologists, this book will be of interest to academics and students in these areas, as well as psychologists and counselors interested in addressing Internet Addiction as a collective, societal ill.

Preface by Ian Parker

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chapter 2

A Brief Take on "Internet Addiction" in Psychology

Chapter 3

Schizoanalysis, Technology, and Sociality

Chapter 4

Users and Technologies of Self

Chapter 5

Extraction Machine of Social Media

Chapter 6

Data Collection and the Relational Factory

Chapter 7

Conclusion

Emaline Friedman, Ph.D., is an independent scholar and psychosocial theorist. Her research interests cover all forms of digital control and exploitation: data capitalism, platform labor, AI-enabled bigotry, and software cultures. She works on distributed ledger technologies to steer networked social organization toward human solidarity initiatives, environmental regeneration, and other forms of commoning.