Jacob LaFlamme
Professor Emerson
November 2, 2017
English 110-C

Internet User Behavior

I chose the essay, “User Behaviour: Websites and apps are designed for compulsion, even
addiction. Should the net be regulated like drugs or casinos?” By Michael Schulson. Mr.
Schulson is a freelance writer and editor at Religion Dispatches magazine, he produces The
Cubit, a section covering science, religion, technology, and ethics. The essay was published in
the online publication called Aeon. Aeon is a not for profit charity that was founded in Great
Britain and runs a digital magazine that publishes essays, ideas and short video documentaries.
They partner with university research groups and university presses. They identify their mission
as being committed to big ideas, serious inquire and a humane worldview.

I chose this article because it discusses regulation of the internet. I am very interested in
the idea of net neutrality and internet regulation. The essay discusses heavily the concept of
addiction to the internet as well as distraction from the internet. It also looks closely at tech
companies and how they fight to win as much of their users’ attention as possible and how this
closely relates to creating a product that is an addiction like gambling or drugs. The business of
tech and users and how a tech company’s financial future is an especially interesting piece of the
article.

I believe that my source is reliable because of the partnerships between the publisher of
the article, Aeon, as well as the credibility of the author of the article, Michael Schulson. Mr.

Schulson, in addition to being a freelance writer, is an associate editor at Religion
Dispatches magazine. Within the magazine he produces ‘The Cubit’, that covers science,
religion, technology, and ethics. Religion Dispatches’ board of directors includes twenty
representatives, professors and chairs of divisions within prestigious universities and Ivy league
colleges in the US including: Union Theological Seminary; Religious Coalition for Reproductive
Choice; Princeton, New York, Yale, and Columbia University; Harvard Divinity School:
University of California Berkeley and ten other prestigious universities and Ivy league colleges.
Aeon is a well-known digital magazine that maintains partnerships organization to publish in
collaboration with Aeon. These organization include Oxford University Press, the London
Health and Society club, Princeton university press, the Cognitive Neurological Society and
several others.

While reading the article, I could see connections between Restak and his fear that the
internet is changing the function of our minds regarding distraction. Mr. Schulson also refers to
human-machine interaction and the deliberate engineering of the way the internet is designed,
this is like the idea of minds becoming a machine as Restak talked about. Also, I can connect
with how Anderson sought out experts to understand how best to manage the inattention. Both
Restak and Anderson look to identify how a person could prevent distraction, in Schulson’s
article he looks more at how the tech industry tries to capture that inattention, create an obsession
and make it monetary. This article discusses how the habit-forming internet can also be under
observation for not only the fact that it causes distraction but also that it causes compulsive
behavior. It is the compulsive behavior that can be used a threat to regulate this industry.