Postman argues that the U.S. has become a 'technopoly', a culture whose "information immune system is inoperable....whose available theories do not offer guidance about what is acceptable information in the moral domain" (1993: 79). A technopoly is "a twentieth-century thought-world that functions not only without a transcendent narrative to provide moral underpinnings but also without strong social institutions to control the flood of information produced by technology...Because that flood has laid waste the theories on which schools, families, political parties, religion, nationhood itself are based, American Technopoly must rely, to an obsessive extent, on technical methods to control the flow of information." (1993: 82-83). Information gluttony, in this view, stems from abandonment of traditional disciplining processes, which has severed the "tie between information and human purpose ... [so that we have] information without meaning, information without control mechanisms" (1993: 70). If the verb to glut is "to exhaust the power of gratifying desire" (The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 1971: 1161), the information glutton is someone who has lost the power to gratify her desire for information.
To continue our example of food consumption, if we abandon the disciplining processes represented by the family dining regime, where the consumption of information is carefully framed - i.e., 'controlled' - within the production of meaning and the moral order it presupposes, we either replace the family disciplines with others or risk losing the ability to know when to stop consuming. Stacey (1994) reminds us that Americans now tend to eat alone and 'on the fly' far more than they used to, grazing frequently on the junk food products which in 2000 will outnumber natural foods in U.S. supermarkets. "The main reason we have so many fat people [in the U.S.]...is they're eating terrible food for their meals - frozen TV dinners and things like that - and they're not satisfied, so then they snack. And they're never really satisfied, so they keep snacking" (Julia Child, cited in Stacey 1994: 58-9). Oldenburg (1991: 179) notes that, since World War II, the percentage of alcoholic drinks consumed in public places has dropped from 90% to 30%, as the communal public 'third places' between the world of work and the home (neighborhood bars, pubs, etc.) have largely disappeared in the U.S. Increasingly, our consumption of all kinds of information - food, liquor, TV shows - takes place within the private cocoon of U.S. homes, where more people are living alone or, even if residing together, tuning in to the TV, radio, stereo, or computer in their own, individual space within the house and 'tuning out' the people around them. "Today's legacy to youth is one of isolation," Oldenburg writes. "The American child spends far less time with real people and far more time watching television, listening to the stereo and talking on the phone." (Oldenburg 1991: 264).
Traditional disciplining techniques are gradually being replaced by 'technical methods' for controlling information flow such as bureaucracies and their experts (Postman 1993, following Beniger 1986). To take only the example of dining, today our decisions about what we should eat, how much, and when is guided less by traditional culinary control mechanisms such as familial, ethnic, national, age or gender ideologies than by the pronouncements of experts such as nutritionists, physicians, scientists, food industry experts, professional cookbook writers, lifestyle preceptors, and so on. We increasingly rely on these experts, and the institutions they represent, to survey our behavior and to instruct us about what we should 'watch out for', what is good for us, and what constitutes the good life.
To exercise any power, the new disciplining technologies must rely on the very information technologies which contributed to the decline of the social filters which gave rise to them. It seems unlikely that they will be immune to the erosion of credibility suffered by traditional mechanisms. In the swarm of discourse which pulsates around us in myriad formats, how do we know which of the endless communities of experts we should heed in forming our beliefs, especially when they often give conflicting advice on a subject? In this paper, we look at Internet users as they try to form their beliefs about the Internet as a controlling mechanism in their lives. We do this by looking at the discussions about the sign Internet Addiction. Threaded throughout this discourse are the questions: Does it exist? Who really 'knows' about it? How can it be detected? If it exists, what can be done about it and who should be involved? Outside of this discourse, we must also ask a broader question: Does the Internet both bolster and undermine new technical control mechanisms?