The Acceleration of Addictiveness
Let me play devil's advocate for a minute.  Why is this "new" addiction <i>wrong</i>?  What does it mean to say it is <i>bad</i>?<p>pg is taking great pains to distance himself from <i>real</i> addiction, like crystal meth.  Yet he never explicitly explains anywhere why the new "addiction" is actually <i>bad</i>, other than trying to loosely associate it with alcohol.  I don't think that the "addictiveness" of a thing <i>alone</i> is enough to call it bad.  I'm way more addicted to air than a meth addict is addicted to his fix, and I don't consider air addiction a disability.<p>Now perhaps he's right and it really is bad--but I think this is a fundamental assumption that needs to be discussed and argued, not swallowed whole.<p>* Is it <i>morally</i> bad?<p>* Is it <i>dangerous</i>?<p>* Can the claims of loss of productivity be scientifically substantiated?  To what extent?<p>* To what extent is the comparison to alcohol valid?  Is it mood-altering?  Does it significantly affect decisionmaking?<p>I think these are important questions that we have somehow skipped in this discussion.<p>My personal take is that we simply have a lot more free time now than we did 50 or 100 years ago, where we needed to spend more time feeding and clothing ourselves, and so Farmville arises to fill the empty space.  Could this be redirected into something productive?  Maybe?  But people also burn out and have inefficiencies, so I'm not sure you could extract much more productivity unless we returned to hand-to-mouth.