The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

by Matthew B. Crawford

The appeal of the Leap Frog Learning Table for toddlers frustrated with their bodies appears to be similar to the appeal of slot machines for adults frustrated by life. The latter is explained by Natasha Dow Schüll in her deeply disturbing book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. The goal for compulsive machine gamblers is not to win money, as one might suppose, and you cannot understand their addiction without keeping this in mind. The goal is to get in the zone: the place where “their own actions become indistinguishable from the functioning of the machine. They explain this point as a kind of coincidence between their intentions and the machine’s responses.”1 You hit the button and the machine responds every time. Schüll in fact notes parallels to children’s electronic games, and draws on studies of these that explore a certain paradox. The appeal of the games is that they give the player a sense of control. But precisely because she is able to reliably produce an effect (such as an auditory beep), the player loses herself in the machine and enters a state of absorbed automaticity, which would seem to be the opposite of control. This state is in fact more passive than active. Schüll quotes