Facebook Addiction, by Q. Reyes – Artistic Warfare #89

December 13, 2010 Q. Reyes 0 Comments

Come to find out that I have a Facebook addiction, or simply put, a lack of what it takes to live without social networking technology.  Last week, I pledged to go a whole week without Facebook, Twitter and anything else social.  I failed.

The only thing I was able to accomplish was not updating my status the entire week, but I did everything else you could do.  The first couple of days, I did really well, sort of.  But as the week continued, my plans deteriorated right in front of me.

I do have to admit that I had to check Facebook a couple of times for business reasons.  Believe it or not, some people do use Facebook to set up meetings and other business-related activities.

Other reasons for checking my Facebook this past week include adding people to my friends’ list and wanting to check out some of their pictures.  Another reason was find out what certain people where doing, in order to plan a plan accordingly (meaning, is a certain girl off work so that I can take her out).

I have to say that my usage of Facebook decreased at least by eighty percent, even though that simply was not good enough.  I guess my expectations of being able to quit cold turkey were unrealistic.

As for Twitter, it didn’t matter much, since the activity there is a lot more random.  One social application I did miss was Foursquare (an application designed to check-in to places and earn points and badges).  I missed this application because I use it almost as a location journal for myself – plus the points and badges bring out my competitive side (even though I’m competing with myself).

As predicted, I did manage to get a lot more work done by staying away from Facebook.  I think this boost in production is a lot more psychological than actual, however.  In any way, it worked.

I have this slight urge to continue my pledge, but I don’t want to make it so unrealistic.  I’m not sure whether to classify my social network dependency issue as a bad habit hard to break or a simple full-blown addiction.  Being in the middle of it, I can’t be too impartial to make such determinations.