Digital Addiction: The Cultural Production of Online and Video Game Junkies

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which a concept of 'digital addiction' is produced in academic discourse, news media and contemporary popular culture. Digital addiction is used here as a collective term for the phenomena of internet/online addiction and addiction to electronic games. By showing how these are produced individually and together in the popular imaginary, the paper explores several of the ways in which the digital is likened to chemical, illicit or hallucinogenic drugs. It is shown that this association is made through normative discourses which work through a reductive and over-simplified representation of a real/virtual dichotomy that favours the real as physical and local over the virtual, which is represented as dangerous, false and addictive.