This is a gutless book.

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked purports to be an examination of contemporary media and their addictive qualities, yet very few of these pages explore any such ground. Rather, Alter parades psychological experiment after psychological experiment after psychological experiment, one after another, again and again, mice pressing levers to receive the orgasm drug, pigeons pecking buttons for food pellets, kittens kept in dark rooms before being put in cylinders with stripy patterns, and so on. The reader it seems, is left to draw her own conclusions.

Each time one of these laboratory escapades comes close to being compelling in the context of digital media, Alter swerves away, as if it was his mission to avoid saying anything the least bit original or interesting. The worst instance is with the (very brief) discussion of pornography. In 320 pages of text--about addictive tech, remember--pornography is allocated exactly two pages. And what's worse is these two pages serve only to prop up a half-baked rehash of Freudian theories of repression, in this case, about inhabitants of States of conservative persuasion being more inclined to open their browser for purposes of self-abuse than the good people of, say, Vermont. No mention whatsoever of the modern malaise resultant from constant and early exposure to literally anything you want. No mention of the ways addiction to pornography can compound addiction to digital technology. No mention of the tension between cerebral attempts at self-control and the reptilian brain stem and its unceasing demands. Instead, we merely get the banal (and predictable) observation that societal repression creates urgent needs for release.

Any discussion of violence and its appeal is totally absent. Alter discusses video game addiction, but only Tetris and World of Warcraft, and in the latter case, the mechanism of addiction is left untouched in favor of a tedious gloss of one individual's tendency to draw the blinds, give up all efforts to maintain personal hygiene, and play WoW for months on end. One wonders why Alter didn't here turn again to Freud and explore video games as an outlet for aggression. Indeed, leaving both sex and violence as aspects in digital technology addiction unexplored is unforgivable.

But, I have to concede, perhaps it's me who's the fool. I did, after all, go into this book looking for an intensive examination of where the hands have come to on the clock, and instead I got a pretty lousy pop-psychology book that offered little of value. I guess the blurb by Malcolm Gladwell on the cover should have given me a clue. But it's over now. /rant