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Shifting dynamics or breaking sacred traditions?: the role of technology in twelve-step fellowships

Published: 27 April 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Twelve-step fellowships are the most common long-term maintenance program for recovery from alcoholism and addiction. Informed by six months of participatory observation of twelve-step fellowship meetings and service structure, I conducted in-depth interviews with twelve members of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA) about the role of technology in recovery. I found that there are a number of tensions in how technology is perceived and adopted. As technology and twelve-step fellowships interact, issues of anonymity, identity, consensus, access, unity, autonomy, and physical presence are foregrounded. I relate these findings to the broader research landscape and provide implications for future design in this space.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '13: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2013
    3550 pages
    ISBN:9781450318990
    DOI:10.1145/2470654
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 27 April 2013

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    1. addiction
    2. recovery
    3. spirituality
    4. twelve-step fellowships

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