Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked

The writing is decent enough, but the topic is more important than the way this argument is articulated. There's a maliciousness to the way that social media and networked technologies are meant to engage users and then keep them hooked. This book could have and should have been built around really striking that chord entirely through relevant research on how corporations like Facebook, Google, Instagram, etc are doing this, but instead it's mostly anecdotal, ie, each chapter is mostly comprised of stories about goals (ie, running marathons), feedback (ie, gambling), or progress (ie, Super Mario Brothers) to show how technological addiction can work in pieces. He then sprinkles in some more hard hitting facts about contemporary implementation from those corporations. If they're doing this, I don't need anecdotes to explain goal-orientation beyond a page or so to set it up: just get to the point and then hit it home. Since they are doing this, just make the points and elaborate on them instead of making them the background to a book about a time when someone found a game was addictive or the author thought so.The cell phone is the fastest and most widespread acquisition and deployment of a single technology in the history of humanity. In a matter of decades it went from high end status symbol to currently being owned and used by half of the adults in the entire world. A quarter of the world's population are active Facebook users. What the book takes issue with is increasingly vital. When there are folks like Nicholas Carr writing deeply researched and strongly built arguments about the consequences of the interface revolution, it makes this book of anecdotes pretty meaningless. Far from a strong book on the subject and the most crucial pieces could be distilled into a single article.Hard pass.

This book was an interesting if shallow look into behavioral addiction as applied to technology, but I didn't feel like it dove into the technical side enough. I wanted to see more details about the sites, apps, and devices we use and the specific tricks they use to hook us. Instead, this book was more about the general topic of behavioral addiction, as applied to technology, and I didn't think it was particularly insightful in that. That's fine, just not exactly what I came for.

This was a pretty disappointing read. There's a lot of nice background information in here about things like (1) the history of the different ways in which addiction has been conceptualized, (2) background on a famous behavioral psychology studies, and (3) the basis of "addictive" design in things like slot machines and social media. But, sadly, all of this builds towards a conclusion that never really comes to fruition. Namely, after pretty firmly establishing that we, in the modern world, are really fighting against some powerful and pernicious digital devices and platforms that are designed to foster behavioral addiction, the author utterly fails to indict anybody in the Tech community for having willfully painted us into this corner—not Mark Zuckerberg, not Steve Jobs, not the UX designers who invented features like pull to refresh who don't allow their children to use handheld devices anymore. Instead, he offers some flimsy suggestions for replacing behavioral addictions with better habits, and even then suggests that gamification could be a positive form of behavioral addiction.In short, there's some cool background information in this book, but don't look for anything deeper than that.

This is a well-written and entertaining, yet frightening book about how tech designers use our own evolutionary structures to get us addicted to their products. In addition to an explanation of the science behind addiction, the author uses interesting anecdotes to illustrate key points. As a result of reading this book, I've decided to be more cognizant of the time I spend on apps, social media, and just staring at my phone in general. I hope that by being able to recognize the weapons that are being used against me, I can combat them in order to take control of my own attention.

Scary facts about how we are being influenced by our PDA's (Pocket Distraction Agents) and what to do to conquer this time pirate.

extremely interesting read!

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If it is your first book, then sure, it is 5/5 book. However, if you red many books and know what the book should be like, then you will be disappointed, because it is not a book. It is a collection of anecdotes. Not only it is a collection of anecdotes but is also a collection of authors failing attempts to connect those anecdotes.Sometimes I felt genuinely insulted. For example, author talked about Super Mario, and how that game was good, because it was easy for the newbies to learn how to play it without explicit tutorials. Then author described a game where you bet for 20 dollars and if you bet higher than your friend, you will win those 20 dollars. The problem was that you did not stop after the bet of 20 dollars, because the loss will mean much more. And then the author concludes: "For my students, the hook was the slim chance of winning twenty dollars at the heavy discount. In my case, the hook was a plumber named Mario in search of a kidnapped princess." Seriously? How is that even connected?Then the author includes a lot of unnecessary information and unnecessary stories (that also have no connection at all to the main theme of the book) just because he knows them. For example, the author described for 2 pages the personalities of researchers. Why should I care? The research itself was described in 2 pages and the people were not mentioned ever again. Why do you describe their personalities of those researchers for 2 more pages?And It happens all the time. The author writes stories that he knows of, and then tries really hard to connect them to the main narrative (one example is on the page 212, if you have the book). And you know what is the main narrative? There is no main narrative. It is just a collection of stories.His interview on Fresh Air is 100 times better than the book and only discusses a small fraction of it longer than the book does.

I liked the first two thirds of the book. It gives a good introduction to the field and entertianingly presents base insigths like intermittent rewards or general social pressure in games. But as a long time WoW player (addict ?) I was hoping for a more detailed analysis. WoW is presented as the main evil (of the past/for men) and retained a complete boogeyman myth, too dangerous to even try for research.E.G. I miss discussions on- how the profession progression in the game mimics real learning and buildup of dexterity while you learn exactly nothing- how the quests address real life virtues and archaic instincs "to save the helpless children in our village you need patience and discipline"- how beeing rescued by a high level player motivates to level up to become a helping hero yourself- how a plethora of side activities neutralizes the need for doing something different than "gaming" (leveling/raiding) "I dont play, I just skill/farm etc.)- the deep feeling of rejection when beeing "kicked" from a group that after a short phase of dreading the game rebounds as even fiercer motivation to become too valuable to be kickedWhen it comes to the consequences of addiction the book descends into the dogmatic realm of "should" where most of the psychologic/sociologic books fail. As there is no real scientific reason not to become a tyrrant (except for the fact that it's impossible for many people to do this simultaneously) the authors construct visions of "healthy behaviour" that stem from statistics "healthy people are normal as they reside in the center of all our normal distributions" or implicit self-praise of the author "normal people need to grow up like most kids did when I was a child".Here the book leaves the ground of empiric facts and accepts isolated experts' statments as normative truth.A contradictive example from MMOs: At some point (for example when choosing or even creating addons) players start to see behind the surface and consider the underlying technology. This ability might be way more usefull in a gamificated future than to recognize the mood of Mona Lisa with one look, what is - without second thought - used as a measure of the positive effekts of sulking in the woods.