A9, when you find yourself watching the download bar, too closely

The massive content network available to Internet users —enabled through trails of hyperlinks, online data repositories, torrents, and peer-to-peer software—introduces “downloading” into the sphere of Problematic Internet Use (PIU). Downloading, or more specifically to this post, downloading music, has analogues in the physical realm, e.g., shopping addiction and a host of other compulsive collecting/hording disorders. Compulsivity of this kind, among many other significant problems, causes the downloader to decontextualize the object downloaded, essentially, in Marxian terms, replacing the use value of the object (song/album/clip) with its exchange value, the act of downloading.

Before applying PIU theories to music downloading, I’ll provide an assumptive example. Some users of an online torrent-exchange website have compiled music collections (full albums) of such monstrous proportions, 120+ gigabytes, that they would need to spend over two months of 24/7 (that’s non-stop) music listening to hear every track. Further, this is contingent that said person stopped downloading music over the period of listening. Excessive? Definitely. But further mechanisms must be understood. A torrent is a file (e.g., OnTheBeach.torrent) that contains information regarding the whereabouts of an album’s files. The downloader doesn’t need to spend much time looking over album reviews or the song titles or anything; the music-related substance mostly factors in after the torrent download link is clicked.

Caplan’s Theory of Problematic Internet Use and Psychosocial Well-Being, drawing on Davis’s emphasis on the psychosocial aspects of PIU (e.g., “depression and loneliness”), is less useful for the particulars of this topic than the more generally applicable concepts of the Generalized Problematic Internet Use Scale. The obsessive music downloading cycle begins when the user recognizes the widespread and (near) immediate availability of music. This exemplifies the concept of “excessive internet use.”

A topical problem needs to be addressed at this point (and again below): music downloading can easily be done illegally, which greatly increases the likelihood of obsessive downloading because no regular monetary exchange takes place. (That said, though there is a monetary exchange with iTunes, for example, it is abstracted after the initial input of credit card, et al, information; effectively, the user doesn’t have to consider each purchase individually, as they would for a physical exchange of money.)

Excessive downloading becomes compulsive downloading when a user can no longer feasibly retain or listen to each song or album they download. Despite this, the user continues to download, and goes through the motions obsessively, almost as if to “keep up” which the Internet virtually allows someone to do because of the glut of content. This compulsive downloading begins “the vicious cycle of cognitive distortions and reinforcement” that David, Flettt, and Blesser describe in their study (Caplan, p632). Downloading breeds more downloading: you begin to think you can find rarer albums, unreleased live albums, et al, and more time is spent searching online, and proportionally, less time is spent learning about or listening to those albums.

Some form of guilt would surface, stemming from (1) excessive time spent online (2) Illegally obtaining and not compensating for an artists’ work (3) the build-up of un-listened to albums (4) the need to buy more hard-drive space. Withdrawal, then, might occur after excessive guilt creates the need for a moratorium from downloading – but as time passes, and new albums are released, a user will feel the negative effects of withdrawal. The cycle picks up again, and Problematic Internet Use results.