Push and pull factors

This chapter, as the name suggests, focuses upon the push and pull factors relating to intensive internet use. Like a coin, the internet — or its driving mechanisms — could be said to have two sides. One side contains push factors while the other contains pull factors, but both are magnetic in that they “attract” the person into its sphere of influence. That is, the internet serves particular functions for certain people. The push factors can be understood as stemming from what Fromm and Laing would call acts of self-preservation, and which can be understood as constituting part of the son's “mouseness.” Basically, the retreat from normalcy and advance toward the freedom of the internet, the internet bar, and one's peers, is done partly in order to preserve one's autonomous self (separateness). This thwarting and suppression of the autonomous self is conceptualized using two main concepts: engulfment and depersonalization. Both of which can be said to “push” the son away from a normalcy they experience as emotionally stifling, and toward the internet which is experienced as liberating because it reinforces autonomy and individuality. The pull factors, on the other hand, principally stem from more intensive strivings — relatedness/transcendence/orientation and devotion — and can be understood as constituting part of the son's “tiger-ness.” This is also the “devotion” to feelings of success, achievement, power, prestige, and domination — which the biomedical model conceptualizes as an “addiction” but which in reality is them attempting to adhere to society's dominant values and ethics within a socially devalued (cyber)space. Fromm notes that these strivings, what he calls “frames for orientation and devotion,” are rooted in the same need from which religious and philosophical systems spring for they stem from the attempt to make sense of one's existence and place in the world. ¹ That is why the internet bar is like a kind of monastery, because it is a space in which people can attend to that central paradox in their existence: the simultaneous seeking of closeness and of independence, or the striving for oneness with others and at the same time the preservation of one's uniqueness and particularity. ² Thus the underlying premise of the push/pull mechanism is the following: “the nature of all life is to preserve and affirm its own existence.” ³