This document discusses how technology and social media have changed relationships, sex, and addiction in the modern world. It notes that technological advances now allow for more immediate, intense, and accessible pleasurable experiences and substances. However, these can enable addictive behaviors, especially in vulnerable individuals using them to cope with stressors. The document urges clinicians to stay informed about issues as they relate to both adults and children, in order to help clients raise families and set healthy technology-related boundaries in a non-judgmental way.

1. Robert Hudson
Apps, Sex, Intimacy and Infidelity:
The Effect of Social Media and Technology on
Relationships and Sex Addiction

2. How many of these out of date 20th century
devices have hauled with you into the 21st?
• VCR’s, VHS, Tapes, CD’s, DVD’s, Records (LP’s, and 45’s),
• Sony Walkmans, Cassettes tapes,
• 8, 16, 35mm film,
• Typewriters, Ribbon,
• Pen Pals, Scrapbooks
• XXX Theaters, Street Prostitutes

3. We can’t not be.
And what best determines how you are adjusting to the
grief process?
YOUR AGE!
So we are grieving these profound
cultural changes, right?

4. • Denial and isolation
• Bargaining
• Depression
• Acceptance
• Or somewhere going back and forth….
So where are you in your Analog to Digital
world of grief process?

5. Note the escalating speed of technological change
• Radio took 38 years to reach our homes
• Television took 13 years to reach our homes
• Internet took 4 years to reach our homes
• Social Networking took 16 months to reach our homes
• Smart Phone apps took 9 months to reach our homes
Whatever is yet to come is now here before we even know it.

6. New worlds, shifting concepts
In one example today, infidelity can no longer be defined in
physical terms. I think of it more globally as the keeping of
secrets in an intimate relationship.
And today, what you consider to be a relationship, depends
mostly on – you got it!
How old you are…

7. Intensely Refined Substance (20th century)
• High caloric foods and snacks
• Distilled alcohol
• Cocaine, highly refined marijuana, prescription drugs
Think of how technology has escalated our
ability to more readily obtain:

8. And Intensely Refined Experiences (via 21st century digital
media)
• Gambling and Gaming
• Shopping
• Sexual content and experiences
Think of how technology has escalated our
ability to more readily obtain:

9. Understanding technology and the addictions
The escalation of addictive behaviour has been,
and always will be driven by…
Technological advances

10. Why Addiction?
While majority of us may take pleasure in these more
immediate, more intense and more accessible pleasurable
substances and experiences, the vulnerable among us end-
up addicted.
They abuse these same activities to escape, self-soothe,
distract and dissociate from stressors (both internal and
external).

11. • So how does technological advance evoke behavioural
escalation (in the addictions)?
• How prepared are you today to clinically manage adult-
life related tech issues?
• Has it occurred to you yet, that the digital/social media
world is a unique and separate world and culture from our
lives?
• And how educated are we re: the clinical management of
Child + Teen related Tech issues?

12. Below are the most popular app-based, Geo-Locating “friend
finders” or hook-up apps for casual sex-today.
Tinder – Single straight people under 35
Grinder – Gay men / Qrushr – Girls-Lesbian Woman
And if you feel badly after… there’s an app based solution for
that too!

13. So how can clinicians stay current?
• By learning how to negotiate and understand the world of
our young people and highly tech savvy adults.
• By understanding these issues as they present – not how
they are slanted by the media or our social peers.

14. Then we can best help our clients to:
• Raise healthy, safe families
• Set and negotiate useful tech-related boundaries
• Separate the issues from the tech
• Offer our insight – non judgement or fear

15. Q & A
Thanks!

16. Harness persuasive technology for good