Nowadays it is almost impossible to find a young person who does not have a cell phone or an account (or few) in various types of social media like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, etc. Large and small IT companies invest enormous amounts of resources for developing a vast amount of online and mobile applications. Various entertainment websites generate and accumulate tons of content that are spread within social media on a daily basis. Does focusing of the significant amount of entertaining resources on the attracting attention of cell phone owners help them to gain useful information, or does it turn them into addicts?
The software of modern cell phones in the majority of cases provides the functionality similar to PC and laptops, and the internet connection is available almost everywhere. On one hand, it provides modern individuals with a possibility to access all the required information within few minutes, but on the other hand, the individual loses some restrictions that provide him or her with an opportunity to look aside, to get a bit of real, offline life. According to 2009 National Poll findings 22% of teens check social networking sites more than 10 times a day and 28% have shared personal information that they normally wouldn’t have shared in public (“Common Sense” par. 2). It is a quite regular situation when few people considered as friends share a table in a cafe or bench in a park not having a conversation but checking online statuses of their peers or playing games. It might start as a joke, but later on, the situation becomes common. People start preferring offline to online, posting and reading insignificant things they would hardly pay attention if they would have no audience to share.
Many of the signs of social media addiction resemble those of drug or alcohol addicts. The person takes the substance, or in case of social media, keeps checking and updating online status or website on and on. There are withdrawal symptoms like bad temper, poor focus on real-life issues, frustration, and angriness, depression if an individual has no opportunity to use a cellphone or to get online. Insomnia, decreasing or increasing the appetite can also be observed. All types of addiction may cause dropping hobbies and activities as well as relationship problems.
There are several reasons, causing such type of behavioral pattern. The addiction might be caused by the lack of attention and communication in the real life (Mesch and Talmud 41). Later on even if the situation had fixed the old habits stayed. The other reason lies within physiology. As concluded on the basics of many researches, extracting “information from friends’ pages appears particularly pleasurable” and “may be linked to the activation of the appetitive system, which indicates that engaging in this particular activity may stimulate the neurological pathways known to be related to addiction experience” (Kuss and Griffiths 3532). Another reason might be the lack of offline activity and offline interests, online life might seem to be brighter, following talented person might enrich individual’s life with emotions, making him, or her renew the social network page every 30 minutes.
The only cure for such kind of obsession is to make individual’s own life vivid and more exciting. Focusing on offline issues helps a lot and it is always important to keep in mind that checking funny pictures posted by someone usually leads to another set of funny pictures or jokes and it will continue on and on. That is the way online technologies work. They are not aimed to provide an individual with important knowledge; they are just a waste of time he or she can spend with friends and family.
Works Cited
Common Sense: Is Social Networking Changing Childhood? 2009. Web.
Kuss, Daria J., and Mark D. Griffiths. “Online social networking and addiction—a review of the psychological literature.” International journal of environmental research and public health 8.9 (2011): 3528-3552. Print.
Mesch, Gustavo S., and Ilan Talmud. “Online friendship formation, communication channels, and social closeness.” International Journal of Internet Science 1.1 (2006): 29-44. Print.