The World Health Organisation is to include “gaming disorder”, the inability to stop gaming, into the International Classification of Diseases. By doing so, the WHO is recognising the serious and growing problem of digital addiction. The problem has also been acknowledged by Google, which recently announced that it will begin focusing on “Digital Well-being”.

• Social Networks Like Facebook
• Gambling Social Networks Network
• Gambling Social Network Analysis

Social Networks Like Facebook

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Although there is a growing recognition of the problem, users are still not aware of exactly how digital technology is designed to facilitate addiction. We’re part of a research team that focuses on digital addiction and here are some of the techniques and mechanisms that digital media use to keep you hooked.

Compulsive checking

Digital technologies, such as social networks, online shopping, and games, use a set of persuasive and motivational techniques to keep users returning. These include “scarcity” (a snap or status is only temporarily available, encouraging you to get online quickly); “social proof” (20,000 users retweeted an article so you should go online and read it); “personalisation” (your news feed is designed to filter and display news based on your interest); and “reciprocity” (invite more friends to get extra points, and once your friends are part of the network it becomes much more difficult for you or them to leave).

Technology is designed to utilise the basic human need to feel a sense of belonging and connection with others. So, a fear of missing out, commonly known as FoMO, is at the heart of many features of social media design.

Groups and forums in social media promote active participation. Notifications and “presence features” keep people notified of each others’ availability and activities in real-time so that some start to become compulsive checkers. This includes “two ticks” on instant messaging tools, such as Whatsapp. Users can see whether their message has been delivered and read. This creates pressure on each person to respond quickly to the other.

The concepts of reward and infotainment, material which is both entertaining and informative, are also crucial for “addictive” designs. In social networks, it is said that “no news is not good news”. So, their design strives always to provide content and prevent disappointment. The seconds of anticipation for the “pull to refresh” mechanism on smartphone apps, such as Twitter, is similar to pulling the lever of a slot machine and waiting for the win.

Most of the features mentioned above have roots in our non-tech world. Social networking sites have not created any new or fundamentally different styles of interaction between humans. Instead they have vastly amplified the speed and ease with which these interactions can occur, taking them to a higher speed, and scale.

Addiction and awareness

People using digital media do exhibit symptoms of behavioural addiction. These include salience, conflict, and mood modification when they check their online profiles regularly. Often people feel the need to engage with digital devices even if it is inappropriate or dangerous for them to do so. If disconnected or unable to interact as desired, they become preoccupied with missing opportunities to engage with their online social networks.

According to the UK’s communications regulator Ofcom, 15m UK internet users (around 34% of all internet users) have tried a “digital detox”. After being offline, 33% of participants reported feeling an increase in productivity, 27% felt a sense of liberation, and 25% enjoyed life more. But the report also highlighted that 16% of participants experienced the fear of missing out, 15% felt lost and 14% “cut-off”. These figures suggest that people want to spend less time online, but they may need help to do so.

At the moment, tools that enable people to be in control of their online experience, presence and online interaction remain very primitive. There seem to be unwritten expectations for users to adhere to social norms of cyberspace once they accept participation.

But unlike other mediums for addiction, such as alcohol, technology can play a role in making its usage more informed and conscious. It is possible to detect whether someone is using a phone or social network in an anxious, uncontrolled manner. Similar to online gambling, users should have available help if they wish. This could be a self-exclusion and lock-out scheme. Users can allow software to alert them when their usage pattern indicates risk.

The borderline between software which is legitimately immersive and software which can be seen as “exploitation-ware” remains an open question. Transparency of digital persuasion design and education about critical digital literacy could be potential solutions.

One-to-one or even one-to-many communication is only the most elementary form of Internet social life. The very nature of the Internet makes spatial distances largely irrelevant for social interactions. Online gaming moved from simply playing a game with friends to a rather complex form of social life in which the game’s virtual reality spills over into the physical world. The case of World of Warcraft, a popular electronic game with several million players, is one example. Property acquired in the game can be sold online, although such secondary economies are discouraged by Blizzard Entertainment, the publisher of World of Warcraft, as a violation of the game’s terms of service. In any case, what does it mean that one can own virtual property and that someone is willing to pay for this property with real money? Economists have begun studying such virtual economies, some of which now exceed the gross national product of countries in Africa and Asia. In fact, virtual economies have given economists a means of running controlled experiments.

Gambling Social Networks Network

Millions of people have created online game characters for entertainment purposes. Gaming creates an online community, but it also allows for a blurring of the boundaries between the real world and the virtual one. In Shanghai one gamer stabbed and killed another one in the real world over a virtual sword used in Legend of Mir 3. Although attempts were made to involve the authorities in the original dispute, the police found themselves at a loss prior to the murder because the law did not acknowledge the existence of virtual property. In South Korea violence surrounding online gaming happens often enough that police refer to such murders as “off-line PK,” a reference to player killing (PK), or player-versus-player lethal contests, which are allowed or encouraged in some games. By 2001 crime related to Lineage had forced South Korean police to create special cybercrime units to patrol both within the game and off-line. Potential problems from such games are not limited to crime. Virtual life can be addictive. Reports of players neglecting family, school, work, and even their health to the point of death have become more common.

Gambling Social Network Analysis

Social networking sites (SNSs) emerged as a significant online phenomenon since the bursting of the “Internet bubble” in the early 2000s. SNSs use software to facilitate online communities where members with shared interests swap files, photographs, videos, and music, send messages and chat, set up blogs (Web diaries) and discussion groups, and share opinions. Early social networking services included Classmates.com, which connected former schoolmates, and Yahoo! 360° and SixDegrees, which built networks of connections via friends of friends. In the postbubble era the leading social networking services were Myspace, Facebook, Friendster, Orkut, and LinkedIn. LinkedIn became an effective tool for business staff recruiting. Businesses have begun to exploit these networks, drawing on social networking research and theory, which suggests that finding key “influential” members of existing networks of individuals can give those businesses access to and credibility with the whole network.