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Breaking the Feedback Loop
Young adults (and plenty of not-so-young adults) are addicted to the Internet. No surprise there. It’s easy for parents and teachers, politicians and pundits to brush off Internet addiction as a harmless, inevitable consequence of the digital age, a small price to pay for carrying the information super-highway around in our pockets. But what if I told you that young adults (and plenty of not-so-young adults) are stuck in a feedback loop of digital sexual stimulation, addicted not just to the Internet but to pornography and social media? And what if I told you that the consequences of these addictions are quite dire—ranging from depression, anxiety and ADHD to
sexual dysfunction and violence? And what if I told you that, as far as social media companies and pornography producers and anyone who advertises on the Internet is concerned, the feedback loop is exactly where we belong?
I am a member of a generation with a dubious distinction—we have only known a wired world. Facebook was born before I was ten years old. Forget dirty magazines squashed under mattresses, Internet pornography—endless free sex, performed live for you in the comfort of your home, 24 hours a day—was available as soon as you had access to an Internet-enabled device, and anyone who has walked into a restaurant or a park lately knows that these days that milestone just about coincides with first steps and probably precedes first words in many cases.
Internet pornography was like mother’s milk to some of my friends. I do not jest. As a student at the University of Pennsylvania and a young intern in the tech world, I lived in the feedback loop. My personality was fragile, my attention span zero. I wasn’t particularly curious about anything other than porn and video games, and I felt disintegrated by the tidal waves of data, most of it pornographic. I didn’t realize I was in hell. I lived with the consequences of being inside a Mobius strip that I did not understand because I could not see it.
How can you see those consequences when everyone you know is stuck in the same loop with you? You can’t see the matrix when you’re inside the matrix.
This book pulls readers out of the matrix. Part manifesto, part autobiography, part self-help roadmap, Breaking the Feedback Loop is a concise, essential guide to porn and social media addiction written for young adults and anyone else suffering at the hands of the Internet.
Here’s the key distinction: this book is written by someone who has gone through the trials and tribulations that plague so many young people. Through extensive research, including interviews with academics and experts, and personal experimentation, I broke free from the feedback loop. And, now that I’m outside of the digital echo chamber—with the artificial moans of corporate pornography still rattling around like background radiation from the Big Bang—I can see how terrifying the trends are in porn and social media consumption. The Internet is an immense maze. And most of us are lost in it.
sexual dysfunction and violence? And what if I told you that, as far as social media companies and pornography producers and anyone who advertises on the Internet is concerned, the feedback loop is exactly where we belong?
I am a member of a generation with a dubious distinction—we have only known a wired world. Facebook was born before I was ten years old. Forget dirty magazines squashed under mattresses, Internet pornography—endless free sex, performed live for you in the comfort of your home, 24 hours a day—was available as soon as you had access to an Internet-enabled device, and anyone who has walked into a restaurant or a park lately knows that these days that milestone just about coincides with first steps and probably precedes first words in many cases.
Internet pornography was like mother’s milk to some of my friends. I do not jest. As a student at the University of Pennsylvania and a young intern in the tech world, I lived in the feedback loop. My personality was fragile, my attention span zero. I wasn’t particularly curious about anything other than porn and video games, and I felt disintegrated by the tidal waves of data, most of it pornographic. I didn’t realize I was in hell. I lived with the consequences of being inside a Mobius strip that I did not understand because I could not see it.
How can you see those consequences when everyone you know is stuck in the same loop with you? You can’t see the matrix when you’re inside the matrix.
This book pulls readers out of the matrix. Part manifesto, part autobiography, part self-help roadmap, Breaking the Feedback Loop is a concise, essential guide to porn and social media addiction written for young adults and anyone else suffering at the hands of the Internet.
Here’s the key distinction: this book is written by someone who has gone through the trials and tribulations that plague so many young people. Through extensive research, including interviews with academics and experts, and personal experimentation, I broke free from the feedback loop. And, now that I’m outside of the digital echo chamber—with the artificial moans of corporate pornography still rattling around like background radiation from the Big Bang—I can see how terrifying the trends are in porn and social media consumption. The Internet is an immense maze. And most of us are lost in it.
- GenresSelf HelpMental Health
170 pages, Paperback
First published April 26, 2018
About the author
A.N. Turner
2 books9 followersA.N. Turner uses his extensive academic and professional knowledge to help people understand and improve their relationship with the Internet. At the University of Pennsylvania he researched the influence of technology, where he was motivated to uncover the truth of Internet addiction, particularly in young adults. His experience working at a marketing partner of Facebook, and overstock.com allows him to understand the manipulative tactics of online super powers, or rather super villains.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 11, 2018
This book was written by a University of Pennsylvania student in his junior year of college. It might be the most important book you will read on the difficulties which face us as a society as we hurl headlong into a life lashed tightly to the internet.
If you have not stopped to thoughtfully consider how your life has been reshaped and leashed to devices and how this is changing who you are at your very core, do it now. Start with this book. I warn you, though. It is disruptive.
Strangely, we will eagerly read about the problems of the past and are often entertained as we read about the potential of the future. However, we are less inclined to critically examine the culture in which we bath ourselves today, right now. I think this is because there is nothing we can do about what has passed or about what has yet to occur. But, we can do something right this minute. We can take some corrective action right now. Inconvenient, right? (I know…)
The author does give many suggestions on how to chip away at our reliance on devices. These suggestions are very doable – setting time limits for checking social media, putting computers and smart phones away in a drawer for X number of hours (or minutes) per day, building slowly toward more independence from them.
I read an article recently which described a looming crisis in our military. https://wjla.com/news/nation-world/wh...
According to the Pentagon, “71 percent of Americans ages 17 to 24, the military's main recruitment source, are ineligible to serve.” That's 24 million of the 34 million people in that age group! Why? To put it bluntly, it is because they are too fat, too dumb or too criminal. Can you guess what the culprit is?
In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald writes: “The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.” This is us. Staring blankly throughout the day and night at our glowing screens, clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking.
The author spends lots of time discussing the devastating effect of internet porn, as he was once addicted himself. More than 30% of the data that travels over the internet every day is porn and that number is growing at a terrifying rate. Predictions are that in a short time, most internet traffic will be porn. It is already the most profitable. Why is this terrifying? As the book discusses in detail, because it cripples – it cripples emotionally, physically, and cognitively. It’s cheap, easy, and everywhere. It is a drug which alters body chemistry. When it is not there, it is craved; when it is obtained, it never, ever fully satisfies. The average age at first exposure to porn is 10. Porn addiction ruins marriages, it ruins the individual’s ability to form normal relationships, and it derails the lives of the boys and youth addicted to it. Consider a young, still-forming brain steeped for hours a day in impersonal, dehumanizing images. Imagine the many ways this will distort and disable for years to come – maybe forever. If your kids have smart phones, they are exposed. Maybe they are even in this fight.
After reading this book, and a few others like it, I knew I could not go back and pretend that spending hours a day online is o.k. It is reducing IQ, it’s sedentary cloak threatens health in multiple ways, and, very possibly, it is delivering the paralyzing poison of porn to every room it enters.
Books like this make us uncomfortable. It made me uncomfortable. Yet, doing nothing is not an option.
Wanting to end on an up-note, I place a short reading here. It motivated me to take some action against the Jekyll/Hyde monster I must live with – the internet. I hope it helps you too.
" It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. "
Man in the Arena , Theodore Roosevelt
If you have not stopped to thoughtfully consider how your life has been reshaped and leashed to devices and how this is changing who you are at your very core, do it now. Start with this book. I warn you, though. It is disruptive.
Strangely, we will eagerly read about the problems of the past and are often entertained as we read about the potential of the future. However, we are less inclined to critically examine the culture in which we bath ourselves today, right now. I think this is because there is nothing we can do about what has passed or about what has yet to occur. But, we can do something right this minute. We can take some corrective action right now. Inconvenient, right? (I know…)
The author does give many suggestions on how to chip away at our reliance on devices. These suggestions are very doable – setting time limits for checking social media, putting computers and smart phones away in a drawer for X number of hours (or minutes) per day, building slowly toward more independence from them.
I read an article recently which described a looming crisis in our military. https://wjla.com/news/nation-world/wh...
According to the Pentagon, “71 percent of Americans ages 17 to 24, the military's main recruitment source, are ineligible to serve.” That's 24 million of the 34 million people in that age group! Why? To put it bluntly, it is because they are too fat, too dumb or too criminal. Can you guess what the culprit is?
In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald writes: “The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.” This is us. Staring blankly throughout the day and night at our glowing screens, clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking.
The author spends lots of time discussing the devastating effect of internet porn, as he was once addicted himself. More than 30% of the data that travels over the internet every day is porn and that number is growing at a terrifying rate. Predictions are that in a short time, most internet traffic will be porn. It is already the most profitable. Why is this terrifying? As the book discusses in detail, because it cripples – it cripples emotionally, physically, and cognitively. It’s cheap, easy, and everywhere. It is a drug which alters body chemistry. When it is not there, it is craved; when it is obtained, it never, ever fully satisfies. The average age at first exposure to porn is 10. Porn addiction ruins marriages, it ruins the individual’s ability to form normal relationships, and it derails the lives of the boys and youth addicted to it. Consider a young, still-forming brain steeped for hours a day in impersonal, dehumanizing images. Imagine the many ways this will distort and disable for years to come – maybe forever. If your kids have smart phones, they are exposed. Maybe they are even in this fight.
After reading this book, and a few others like it, I knew I could not go back and pretend that spending hours a day online is o.k. It is reducing IQ, it’s sedentary cloak threatens health in multiple ways, and, very possibly, it is delivering the paralyzing poison of porn to every room it enters.
Books like this make us uncomfortable. It made me uncomfortable. Yet, doing nothing is not an option.
Wanting to end on an up-note, I place a short reading here. It motivated me to take some action against the Jekyll/Hyde monster I must live with – the internet. I hope it helps you too.
" It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. "
Man in the Arena , Theodore Roosevelt
May 3, 2018
While some might categorize this as a "self-help book," it's really a personal invitation to join the author on his journey into and out of the miserable pit of internet addiction. Not only is this a problem facing the millennial generation, generation x, and the next generations to come, but it's a problem which will only exacerbate over time. Turner's insight is both trenchant and prescient, but more importantly, its personal. Turner allows the reader to step inside his shoes as details the struggles he faced with internet addition and tells a story that's simply not being told today. The author is relatable but also very readable, which makes his approach to such an important story the best I've read to date. Turn off your computer, pour yourself a glass of water, and read this book.
April 28, 2018
Wow, beautifully written, with startling candor, and impressively researched!
This first hand account from a college student at Penn was fascinating from beginning to end. The incredibly destructive effects of even average use of social media was frankly scary to learn. The correlation and statistics between epidemic internet overuse, and isolation, depression, ADHD, and dumbing down were shocking - even to those who had considered themselves aware.
For young men (and young women as well), and society at large, the extent and dangers of porn addiction were even more worrying. Completely unregulated, internet porn and it's stunning addiction levels are revealed to be America's unspoken hidden catastrophe robbing the souls and ability to enjoy life of young men, brewing right under parent's noses in homes & across college campuses nationwide.
Hopefully this book will help better recognize internet and social tech's anti-social assault and ultimately possible demographic and economic consequences ahead.
This first hand account from a college student at Penn was fascinating from beginning to end. The incredibly destructive effects of even average use of social media was frankly scary to learn. The correlation and statistics between epidemic internet overuse, and isolation, depression, ADHD, and dumbing down were shocking - even to those who had considered themselves aware.
For young men (and young women as well), and society at large, the extent and dangers of porn addiction were even more worrying. Completely unregulated, internet porn and it's stunning addiction levels are revealed to be America's unspoken hidden catastrophe robbing the souls and ability to enjoy life of young men, brewing right under parent's noses in homes & across college campuses nationwide.
Hopefully this book will help better recognize internet and social tech's anti-social assault and ultimately possible demographic and economic consequences ahead.
December 26, 2021
Even though this book has aged a bit, it's still relevant today. It has a lot of helpful information, and I am glad I read this book.
May 2, 2018
Wow. Just wow. I picked this book up only a few days ago and flew through it. Why? Because it spoke to me in more ways than I can describe. The author's story is relatable. Frighteningly so. I found myself keeping a running tally of all of the things he described that I was guilty of, and quickly lost count. Turner leaves no stone unturned and no subject is off-limits. Social media? check. Internet porn? Check. Few books are as honest and penetrating into the lives of young adults as this one. However, Turner does not stop after he tells his own story and paints a clear picture of the problems plaguing our society. He also provides a plan for one to pull themselves out of the web of internet, social media and pornographic dependency; he provides an escape map for those of us wanting to live in the real world again. In my opinion, this is the greatest treasure trove of all. If one can follow the advice Turner provides, they can tremendously improve their personal lives. I finished the book just yesterday and have already begun to implement these recommendations into my daily life. I haven't checked Instagram OR Facebook all day. Contrary to the expectations of many millennials, I'm still alive and thriving. Next challenge - cutting out all other virtual distractions and continuing to focus on what really matters: having authentic relationships with other people. Read this book and join those of us who have consciously decided to reclaim our reality.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews