The second it was in my system, I had a brief period where I felt a strange combination of horrible things. One being, Oh my god, I love this. I remember it. This works pretty fucking well. I can't say that there's no part of me that doesn't like this. And then of course there is a part of me that doesn't like it, because I felt guilty for liking it, and I hated that feeling.
The moment he felt sad, or scared, or uneasy, or bored, his hand would shoot instinctively, Gollum-like, toward the device. He scrolled while he walked, while he lay in bed; he scrolled while talking with friends.
It has long been conventional for crime novelists to describe killers using the language of insanity, madness, and mental illness. But in the crime novels of the 1990s, another term keeps cropping up: sick.
To say that an infinitely scrolling feed encourages overuse is to make no comment on its contents; only that the intermittent rewards that such a feed creates turns it into a kind of slot machine, and that teens would be less likely to develop problematic use if it didn't exist.
7mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
