Online gambling venues as relational actors in addiction

Applying the actor-network approach to life stories of online gamblers

Bibliographic Data

ID14908313
AuthorsJukka Törrönen (0000-0003-2473-6330, Stockholm University, corresponding author), Eva Samuelsson (0000-0002-0508-2709, Stockholm University), Malin Gunnarsson (0000-0002-2933-0957, Stockholm University)
Year2020
Volume85
Pages102928
Publication date2020-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Journal of Drug Policy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0955-3959 • E-ISSN: 1873-4758
PublisherElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.drugpo.2020.102928
OpenAlexW3085340710
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited46

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. 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. 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. 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

Actor–network theory · Addiction · Everyday life · Internet privacy · Political science · Scope (computer science · Social science · Sociology · The Internet · World Wide Web · Cinema and Media Studies · Computer Science · Gambling Behavior and Treatments · Psychology · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access