Comment by Gormo
3 days ago
No, addiction involves physical substances interacting with a person's biochemistry. Attempting to extend the concept of addiction to include positive emotions brought on by sensory experiences or behavior is a disingenuous rhetorical tactic.
It's simply not legitimate to redefine "addiction" as anything that people might have an emotional or psychological motivation to participate in.
People trying to use the same terminology to describe social media as is used to describe tobacco or alcohol are trying to sneakily attach the negative associations of those substances to something unrelated entirely to them.
This is a form of deception, and a silly one, since social media has lots of negative aspects that can be argued against in their own right, without needing to engage in manipulative dialog.
Whether you like it or not, addiction is most commonly used as a general term to refer to any sort of compulsive behavior that acts against one's own self interest. Not your strawman of "anything that people might have an emotional or psychological motivation to participate in."
There are plenty of perfectly valid parallels between addiction to alcohol, gambling, porn, social media, junk food, etc. Are you denying that?
You can't just declare anyone comparing them to be disingenuous or disrespectful to those who are addicted. In fact what really seems disingenuous is the huge volume of this kind of pedantry in the thread by you and the same few accounts. Feels like misdirection away from the actual discussion about how to truly mitigate these addictions. Would appreciate your actual thoughts on this.