We know the reason for this pleasure from experiments on conditioning behaviour. Conditioning was originally discovered in the 1890s by Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who noted that the dogs he had been studying learned to anticipate feeding time because they would salivate before the food arrived.33 He then presented the sound of a buzzer (not a bell as popular culture portrays it) with the food so that eventually just the sound elicited salivation. The dog had learned to associate the sound with the food. This was an important discovery. The experimenter could shape the behaviour of the dog to respond to a variety of different stimuli. They could be trained or conditioned by reward. Conditioning was soon developed into a whole school of psychological theory called Behaviourism, championed in the United States by individuals like J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner who claimed that any complex behaviour could be shaped by rewards and punishments.34 In fact, we now know that it is not the rewards that strengthen behaviours but rather the anticipation of rewards, which is so satisfying.
This is because deep inside our brain, close to the brainstem, is a reward system that is invigorated by a cluster of around 15,000–20,000 dopamine neurons that send out long fibres to other regions of the brain. Given the billions of neurons in the brain, it is remarkable that this tiny population is the pleasure centre critical in controlling our behaviour. These neurons enable us to predict and anticipate rewards and punishment.35 Without them, we would be hopelessly inept in decision-making and our behaviour would be erratic. When an animal in a conditioning experiment learns that pressing a lever or pecking a disc will deliver a reward, anticipatory dopamine is released, which reinforces the behaviour rather than the actual reward. We know this because rats with electrodes implanted in the pleasure centre connected to a current will continue to self-stimulate in the absence of any food reward – to the point of starvation.36 The dopamine rush alone is sufficient to condition the behaviour. When patients have electrodes implanted in this same brain region for the treatment of intractable epilepsy, they report feeling pleasure. Like many addictive behaviours from gambling to sex, it’s the thrill of expectation that gives us the best buzz.
What’s more, the best way to strengthen behaviour is to only reward it occasionally – this is called intermittent reinforcement. This is because our brains are always seeking out patterns in the environment. However, information and feedback from the environment is often fragmented and incomplete but our brains allow for such inconsistency. When we do something that seems to cause some form of positive reward, we then repeat the action in an attempt to recreate the pleasure. If this reward is only intermittent we will persist for much longer repeating our attempts. This is the reinforcement principle behind gambling. We gamble more and for longer just waiting for that occasional reward.37 Slot machines only need to pay out every so often on an intermittent reinforcement schedule for players to persist in pumping more coins into them. It’s that dopamine hit of anticipation that perpetuates our behaviour.
In the same way, conditioning explains our online behaviour. We are compelled to check our emails or look for approval from our online community just in case something really important or juicy comes along. Every time I checked my email or hit activity on my blog, I was like a rat in one of Skinner’s conditioning experiments. At first, the numbers were only a handful but every week they increased. Within a month, I was checking activity every day – thrilled when there was a peak or a kind comment, depressed by the dips and disparaging remarks. Most days there was nothing but every so often, I would be rewarded. The dopamine spurt triggered by associated anticipation had become my drug of choice and I had become a numbers junkie looking for more and more hits.
So the Internet can become addictive and it can also be dangerous, especially in the case of immersive gaming where individuals can play for hours in fantasy worlds. In 2010, South Korea had a greater proportion of its population online than any other nation (81 per cent of forty-six million). Most Koreans spend their online time in internet cafés that provide fast but cheap connections. This can have devastating consequences. Many of them develop serious medical conditions related to hours of online activity at the cost of offline inactivity. Their joints swell up. They develop muscular pain. Sometimes it’s others that get hurt. In the same year, a South Korean couple who met online married in real life, but unfortunately had a sickly premature baby.38 But then they decided to continue their lives online in the café across the road in a game where they raised a virtual baby. They only returned to the house once a day to feed their own real baby. This lack of care meant that their own child eventually died of severe dehydration and malnutrition. Undoubtedly, this is an extreme case and many children raised in poverty are neglected but it highlights the compulsion of the Web. I recently hosted a highly educated academic family visiting from the United States and after the initial social conversation and exchange of anecdotes over dinner; we soon dispersed to check our email, Facebook and other online lives. It was not only the adults in the group, but the children as well. At one point, I looked up from my laptop and saw everyone else in the room silently immersed in their own Web. Whereas we once used to compartmentalize our lives into the working day and time with the family, the Web has destroyed those boundaries forever. Most of us are connected and we like it that way. Just like drug addiction, many of us get withdrawal symptoms of anxiety and irritability when we are denied our Web access.
We have become shaped and controlled by our technology in a way predicted by Marshall McLuhan when he introduced phrases such as the ‘global village’ and ‘the medium is the message’.39 Even in the 1960s, before the invention of the Web, McLuhan predicted that society would change to become dependent and shaped by our communications technology. He understood that we extend our self out to others and in doing so, become influenced by their reciprocal extensions. To this extent we are intricately inter-related to each other through the mediums by which we communicate. Likewise, Sherry Turkle, the MIT sociologist, has also described this shift from face-to-face interaction to terminal-to-terminal interaction in her recent book, Alone Together.40 As we spend more time online, we are necessarily less offline, which means that we will cease to live the same lives shaped by our immediate others. Rather, who we are will increasingly become shaped by the mediums in which we exist. Some people find this scary. For many it is liberating.
We All Want a Second Life
What do you do if you are unemployed, overweight and living off benefits with no prospect of escaping the poverty trap? Since 2003, there has been another world you can live in – a world where you can get a second chance. This is Second Life, a virtual online world where you reinvent your self and live a life among other avatars who never grow old, have perfect bodies, never get ill, have fabulous homes and lead interesting lives.