Social networking addiction: it's an epidemic


Over the past several months I've noticed a trend I'm not cool with. The issue: my friend counts on MySpace and Facebook are dropping at a rapid pace. The reason: my friends are addicted and quitting cold turkey.

How can you be "addicted" to a website? Easily, says my Los Angeles friend who is so embarrassed by the addiction he wishes to remain nameless. As a constant quitter/re-joiner, his MySpace habit became a serious issue. "It was a problem, it was seriously interfering with my work and screwing up my productivity. I'm still OCD about it, but for a while I was obsessively checking every hour on the hour. Reading bulletins, reading comments, checking pictures, spending hours looking at and adjusting my own page. I got really self-conscious about checking it after midnight too because then people on the East Coast would wake up the next day and be like, 'God, he was already on today? What a loser.' "

I didn't really buy into the addiction until I received a shocking email today from a long-term childhood friend of mine. After the jump, the dire confessions of a social networking junkie!


Hi Honey,

I just wanted to give you a heads up that I had to close out my facebook account. it just got to be too much. I couldn't handle it. Too many e-mails from people I didn't want to hear from and didn't have time (or interest) to reply to, too many IMs from people I never wanted to hear from again, then embarrassing pictures of me started to show up -- it just got to be too much. so I'm confined to myspace again (and even that's a bit much sometimes).

Anyway - sorry to disappoint, but I still love you! And I am grateful to facebook for putting us in touch last week.

xoxoxoxoxoxo,

-A.


Is this addiction really real? How many of you are sufferers?