Online gambling venues as relational actors in addiction: Applying the actor-network approach to life stories of online gamblers

Autor: Eva Samuelsson, Jukka Törrönen, Malin Gunnarsson
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Social Work
Emerging technologies
Actor–network theory
media_common.quotation_subject
Life story interviews
Internet privacy
030508 substance abuse
Medicine (miscellaneous)
Addiction
Online gambling
Space (commercial competition)
Article
03 medical and health sciences
Online gambling venues
0302 clinical medicine
Humans
030212 general & internal medicine
Sociologi (exklusive socialt arbete
socialpsykologi och socialantropologi)
Everyday life
media_common
Socialt arbete
Sweden
Internet
Scope (project management)
business.industry
Health Policy
Actor-network theory
Assemblage
Sociology (excluding Social Work
Social Psychology and Social Anthropology)
Public Health
Global Health
Social Medicine and Epidemiology
Behavior
Addictive
Europe
Folkhälsovetenskap
global hälsa
socialmedicin och epidemiologi
Gambling
The Internet
0305 other medical science
Psychology
business
Zdroj: The International Journal on Drug Policy
ISSN: 1873-4758
0955-3959
Popis: Background With the emerging technologies of the Internet and smartphones during the last decades, the gambling environment has undergone a massive transformation. In Sweden, and Europe in general, online gambling has more than doubled since 2007. Method The paper studies online gambling venues (OGVs) as relational actors of addiction. By drawing on the actor-network theory (ANT) and assemblage thinking, we examine how OGVs, as actors in specific networks of attachment, enable the development of gambling addiction and facilitate its continuation. The data consists of life story interviews with 34 online gamblers. Results Online gambling venues extend the scope of gambling opportunities through space, providing an easy portable 24-hours-a-day access to gambling online and on smartphones. This increases the spatial mobility of gambling to diverse contexts. By linking gambling to more unpredictably evolving patterns of relations, online gambling venues also increase gambling's temporal mobility to intrude in the habitual trajectories of everyday life. By enhancing the gambling mobility through space and time, OGVs simultaneously extend the scope of situations in which gambling may transform from a controlled activity into an addiction. It is then that the actor-networks of gambling infiltrate in the actor-networks of work, domestic life and leisure, and start to feed processes where they are translated to serve the interests of gambling. Conclusion By giving us tools to challenge simplistic and taken-for-granted explanations of gambling addiction and by allowing us to grasp the flux and changing nature of addiction as a relational pattern of heterogeneous contextual attachments, the actor-network theory can help us to understand the complexity and multiplicity of gambling problems. The knowledge on what kinds of contextual attachments in diverse actor-networks enable harmful gambling and sustain unhealthy relations helps practitioners to focus treatment interventions especially on these contextual linkages and their configurations. Responding to and Reducing Gambling Problems Studies (REGAPS; no 2016–07091) Dilemmas of Help-seeking – Needs, Experiences and Barriers in Contact with Care in the Case of Gambling and Alcohol Problems (grant no 2016–00286) ‘Addiction’ as a changing pattern of relations: Comparing autobiographical narratives about different dependencies, financed by the Swedish Research Council (VR; grant no 2018–01297)
Databáze: OpenAIRE
Externí odkaz: