It can start without a clear decision. A phone is picked up during a brief break, an item is added to the shopping cart after a notification, one video clip follows another, and a discussion continues long after it has ceased to be meaningful. What was supposed to take a few minutes turns into an entire evening. Afterward, the person may feel scattered, tired, agitated, or indifferent. She may have taken in many impressions but remembers little, or may have bought something without really understanding what need the purchase was meant to fulfill.
Such patterns are often described as a lack of self-discipline. That’s too narrow an explanation. Digital environments are socially and economically organized. Platforms measure activity, curate content, reward certain actions, and make others less visible. Friends, workplaces, and public debates create norms around being reachable, up-to-date, and quick. Consumption can grant access to groups, signal status, or offer a brief respite from a stressful situation. An individual’s actions are therefore part of a complex interplay of technology, business models, relationships, rhythms, emotions, and material conditions.
This does not mean that the individual lacks agency or that technology alone determines what happens. A cell phone can provide connection, accessibility, knowledge, organization, creativity, and practical support. Consumption can meet real needs, and digital communities can be crucial for those who would otherwise be isolated. The question addressed in this chapter is therefore not whether technology and consumption are good or evil. The question is what function a particular practice serves in a particular life, what forces sustain it, and at what level change needs to occur.
When Self-Help Is Not Enough
The term “addiction-like” is used here to describe a pattern that may involve a loss of control, intense preoccupation, and continued behavior despite negative consequences. It is not a diagnosis. The World Health Organization, for example, distinguishes a clinically relevant gaming disorder from ordinary or intense gaming by the presence of impaired control, prioritizing gaming over other activities, and continued gaming despite clear negative consequences. Furthermore, the pattern must cause significant distress or impairment to be clinically relevant.
Seek professional help if gaming, internet use, shopping, or other consumption clearly harms your sleep, finances, work, studies, relationships, or health; if you repeatedly fail to limit the behavior; or if you feel the need to hide the extent of it. Call 1177 if you need advice on where to seek care. In cases of suicidal thoughts, immediate danger, threats, or violence, seek care and ensure safety before attempting the exercises in this chapter.
A sudden digital shutdown can also have negative consequences. Technology can be a tool, a way to connect with support, or the place where a person finds their safest community. The exercises should therefore be limited in scope and reversible. The goal is to gain insight into a pattern and change the conditions surrounding it, not to turn your entire daily life into a new control project.
Technology is part of the situation
In the main manuscript’s technosocial analysis, the term “actant” is used to refer to something that makes a difference in a sequence of actions. The term comes from research on how action is distributed among people, objects, rules, and technical systems. A phone is not a person and has no moral responsibility. But its placement, notifications, interface, apps, and connection to other people change what becomes easy to do in a given situation.
This is a way to avoid two oversimplifications. The first is that everything depends on the user’s will. The second is that technology itself has power over a passive person. Michel Callon’s analysis of markets and socio-technical arrangements instead shows how agency is organized. The capacity for action increases or decreases depending on the connections, obstacles, incentives, and resources built into the environment.
For example, a cell phone can serve as an alarm clock, a work tool, a map, a bank, a social meeting place, and an entertainment system all at the same time. When all these functions are contained within the same object, one legitimate action can pave the way for another. A person picks up the phone to reply to a message and finds herself caught up in a flow that the app has placed just a tap away. The question, then, is not merely why she lacked self-control. One can examine the chain of people, objects, signals, norms, and expectations that made the transition likely.
Algorithms Operate Through Institutions
Jenna Burrell and Marion Fourcade describe a society in which algorithms are not merely technical calculations. They are embedded in institutions that classify people, allocate visibility, and make judgments. Here, an institution is a lasting system of rules, roles, and practices. The platform’s algorithm is therefore linked to the company’s business model, the advertising market, legislation, user categories, and the metrics the organization has chosen to optimize.
A user rarely sees the entire system. She encounters the results: recommendations, rankings, reminders, prices, popularity metrics, or a feed where certain items recur. It is important to distinguish between observation and assumption. The fact that certain content appears frequently does not prove exactly how the algorithm works. However, the user can observe what the service measures, what actions it encourages, how easy it is to disable features, and whether decisions can be understood or appealed.
This shifts the analysis from screen time in general to socio-technical power. For example, an app might make it easy to continue using the service but cumbersome to cancel a subscription. A marketplace might create a sense of urgency with time-limited offers. A social feed can make popularity visible in numbers and thereby link attention to status. Such systems sometimes need to be addressed through individual settings, but at other times they require organizational transparency, consumer protection, or political regulation.
Overstimulation and the blasé attitude
Georg Simmel analyzed big-city life as an environment characterized by a constant barrage of impressions, rapid changes, and the need to distinguish the relevant from the irrelevant. The blasé attitude serves as a potential defense mechanism: the person dampens their reaction because not everything can be given full significance. The concept should not be used as a personality type or diagnosis. It describes a relationship between a person and an environment where stimuli become difficult to evaluate.
Digital feeds can intensify this same problem. Many things are presented as new, urgent, or worthy of an immediate reaction. If attention is constantly shifting between objects, the result can be both agitation and numbness. Hartmut Rosa’s theory of social acceleration helps us see that speed isn’t limited to the device itself. Work, news, consumption, and social relationships can together create a norm that one should respond, update, and accomplish more in less time.
Slowing down, therefore, does not necessarily mean doing everything slowly. Some activities benefit from speed. Others lose quality when time is compressed: reading, caring, democratic conversations, creativity, sleep, and conversations where people need to think things through. The main text’s rule of thumb for slowing down— —is normative but useful: ask which practices require slowness to retain their value.
Consumption sometimes solves a social problem
Consumption is not merely an encounter between a person and a commodity. Goods are used within relationships and groups. They can signal taste, competence, care, belonging, or status. Zygmunt Bauman describes how consumer society makes the role of the consumer central: people are expected not only to buy things but also to shape and present themselves as an attractive choice. A purchase can therefore promise a changed social position, even when the practical function of the good is minimal.
The main text distinguishes between “having” and “doing.” Drawing on Erich Fromm, it emphasizes that values such as love, friendship, or knowledge are not primarily possessions but practices. This distinction must not be used in a moralizing way. Many purchases are necessary, bring genuine joy, or make a practice possible. The problem arises when the product is tasked with single-handedly solving something that actually requires time, recognition, community, rest, or changed circumstances.
Tim Kasser’s research on materialistic value orientations shows a link between a strong focus on money, ownership, and status and lower well-being. This does not mean that every purchase is harmful or that poverty can be solved through less materialism. Economic security and access to necessary resources are fundamental. The sociological question is more narrowly defined: What social promise comes with the recurring purchase, and is it fulfilled?
Morality and Status Go Viral Online
Jay Van Bavel and his colleagues summarize research on how social media interacts with morality. Morally and emotionally charged content can spread widely, and platforms can make it cheaper and faster to express punishment, status marking, and group affiliation. Social media does not create morality or conflict out of thin air. It can act as an accelerator for pre-existing group dynamics.
This acceleration has two sides. It can intensify anger, harassment, status struggles, and conflict between groups. It can also facilitate social support, solidarity, and collective action. Therefore, the advice to simply stay away from social issues is not enough. Taking a moment before sharing can be a way to separate the issue at hand from the platform’s fast pace and choose an action that better aligns with what you actually care about.
Four elements can be observed: the issue at hand, the emotion, the audience, and the potential consequence. The audience matters because an action can be directed both at an opponent and at one’s own group. A quick post can confer status within the group without actually improving the issue at hand. Conversely, a slower-paced forum, fact-checking, or concrete organizational work may generate less buzz but make a bigger difference.
Pleasure can become a way to stay stuck
Mark Fisher uses the term “depressive hedonism” to describe a situation in which a person continues to seek easily accessible pleasure without it providing real satisfaction or opening a path out of what is weighing her down. The concept is a social critique, not a medical diagnosis. It draws attention to environments where entertainment and consumption are always readily available, while time, energy, and institutional support for more demanding activities are harder to come by.
It is important not to view all simple pleasures with suspicion. Rest, play, games, and entertainment can be valuable in and of themselves. The question is what effect the practice has over time. Does it provide recovery, connection, or joy? Or does it delay sleep, reinforce isolation, and leave the person feeling more drained? A single activity can serve different functions depending on the time of day, the company, and the extent of the activity.
The distinction in the main text between the “via negativa” and the “via positiva” is useful here. The “via negativa” means removing or reducing something that perpetuates a problem. The “via positiva” means adding a practice that moves things in a desired direction. Simply blocking an app can easily leave a void. Simply adding a new activity may fail if the flow still consumes time. The two approaches may therefore need to be combined on a small scale.
Slowness requires concrete content
A general aspiration to use less technology can easily become abstract. Rosa’s theory of acceleration and the main text’s rule of thumb for slowing down become more useful when linked to a practice whose quality actually requires time. This could be a conversation where both people get to finish speaking, a longer text, a meal, caring for someone, a craft project, or political work that requires substantive preparation.
Slowness is not the same as passivity. A sustained focus can make work faster in the sense that less time is spent on restarting tasks. The main text calls this “slow speed”: the person slows down the pace in order to go further in one direction. It is a normative idea that needs to be tested against the realities of everyday life. Certain jobs, caregiving situations, and ways of functioning do not allow for long blocks of time.
Digital intensity can mask the absence of an alternative
Randall Collins’ theory of interaction rituals emphasizes what can arise when people are present for one another around a shared focus. Digital meetings can also create connection and emotional energy. However, certain mediated situations lack the elements that the body, rhythm, and shared space provide. The main text therefore frames intense technology consumption as a possible signal of a lack of sociality, not as definitive proof.
The question “What is missing?” must be asked with care. For those who face discrimination, have limited mobility, or lack safe local environments, the digital community may be the best available option. The goal is not to replace “online” with “offline” as a general rule. The goal is to compare qualities: reciprocity, shared focus, the opportunity to contribute, physical safety, accessibility, and how the person feels afterward.
A well-defined formulation points to the right level
A pattern can now be formulated as a working hypothesis: “When this situation arises, the continuation of this technological or social connection and this norm or feeling is reinforced. This is a resource that already exists. The next question concerns this level.” The formulation should include no more than two mechanisms. Otherwise, technosocial analysis risks becoming a comprehensive map where everything influences everything else and nothing can be tested.
The level is crucial. At the individual and environmental levels, a person can move a device, change a setting, or bring about a clear conclusion. At the relational level, she can negotiate accessibility. At the organizational level, the workplace can change response norms and digital systems. At the societal level, consumer protection, transparency, and regulation may be needed. Starting with oneself is not always the most relevant or effective approach.
Concept Overview
Technosocial analysis: an examination of how people, objects, technical functions, norms, and organizations together shape a situation.
Actant: something that makes a difference in a sequence of actions. The concept does not attribute human responsibility to objects but rather highlights how action is distributed.
Sociotechnical arrangement: an order in which human agency is shaped by connections between technology, rules, resources, and other people.
Algorithmic institution: a lasting organization of measurement, classification, visibility, and decision-making that incorporates algorithms.
Blasé attitude: Simmel’s concept for a subdued evaluation of impressions that may arise in an overstimulating environment.
Social acceleration: Rosa’s concept describing how technological speed, social change, and the pace of everyday life can drive one another.
The social promise of consumption: the sense of belonging, status, comfort, or change that a product is expected to provide beyond its practical function.
Moral acceleration: when a platform’s pace, audience, and rewards amplify morally charged emotions and group dynamics.
Depressive hedonism: Fisher’s socially critical concept for a continued search for readily available pleasure that does not open a path out of a burdensome state. It is not a diagnosis.
Via negative and via positive: reducing a practice that perpetuates the problem and adding a practice that moves in a desired direction, respectively.
Addiction-like patterns: a descriptive term for loss of control, strong prioritization, and continuation despite negative consequences. The term is not in itself a clinical diagnosis.