I've been interested in the use of the term "addiction" in technology and social media– when the high-tech industry started talking about technology being addictive (or put more starkly, when it became a good thing to try to deny users' agency and choice), and how ordinary people use the term to describe their relationships with technology.
via flickr
Today I stumbled on an interesting fact while reading an essay by George Ainslie on addiction and willpower: the term "addiction" derives from a Latin (or Vulgar Latin, depending on your source) word "addictus," which was a kind of slavery: an 1875 article explains that a debtor "assigned over to the creditor (addictus) by the sentence of the praetor. The creditor was required to keep him for sixty days in chains… [and was free to] treat the debtor, who was addictus, as a slave, and compel him to work out his debt."
As Michael Quinion notes, the first English language use of the word was in Shakespeare's Henry V, when one character says of young Prince Hal that "his addiction was to courses vain," but this meaning of addiction didn't carry the connotations that it does today: it was more like habit or preference or liking, not an involuntary, uncontrollable impulse. That use of the term appears in the early 1900s, in writings about morphine and opium use.
I've been a little dismissive of people who talk about being addicted to social media, but it turns out that there's a strangely fitting double meaning of the word when it's used to describe the feeling having to check email or say something on Facebook. Clearly it references the modern meaning of a compulsion that you're powerless to control. But in an interesting twist, it also hearkens back to the ancient meaning of being addictus to others. Hmmm.
Update, June 29 2012: Historian of medicine Howard Markel writes on our modern and ancient ideas of addiction in the New York Times:
When we say that someone is “addicted” to a behavior like gambling or eating or playing video games, what does that mean? Are such compulsions really akin to dependencies like drug and alcohol addiction — or is that just loose talk?
This question arose recently after the committee writing the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (D.S.M.), the standard reference work for psychiatric illnesses, announced updated definitions of substance abuse and addiction, including a new category of “behavioral addictions.” At the moment, the only disorder featured in this new category is pathological gambling, but the suggestion is that other behavioral disorders will be added in due course. Internet addiction, for instance, was initially considered for inclusion but was relegated to an appendix (as was sex addiction) pending further research….
As anyone familiar with the history of the diagnosis of addiction can tell you, the D.S.M.’s changes accurately reflect our evolving understanding of what it means to be an addict.
The concept of addiction has been changing and expanding for centuries. Initially, it wasn’t even a medical notion. In ancient Rome, “addiction” referred to a legal dependency: the bond of slavery that lenders imposed upon delinquent debtors. From the second century A.D. well into the 1800s, “addiction” described a disposition toward any number of obsessive behaviors, like excessive reading and writing or slavish devotion to a hobby. The term often implied a weakness of character or a moral failing.
“Addiction” entered the medical lexicon only in the late 19th century, as a result of the over-prescription of opium and morphine by physicians. Here, the concept of addiction came to include the notion of an exogenous substance taken into the body. Starting in the early 20th century, another key factor in diagnosing addiction was the occurrence of physical withdrawal symptoms upon quitting the substance in question.