Social Media Addiction

  
Flash: digitally deprived college students go daffy. The youngsters are social media addicts and feel disconnected when not online.

200 University of Maryland undergrads spent an entire “Day Without Media.”  No Blackberry, laptop, television, iPod, texting, Twitter, phone calls, IM-ing, email or Facebook. OMG!

Participants were students in Professor Susan D. Moeller’s JOUR 175 “Media Literacy” course at the U of Maryland J-school. After 24 hours of “cold turkey,” they each wrote around 550 words about their mental states and experiences. Could students TXT this in? BTHOM (beats the hell outa me).

Actually, the “compulsive-impulsive spectrum disorder” of “Internet Addiction” has been described by psychiatrists for years, and may be included in the new edition of the standard psychiatric handbook. Facebook members seem particularly prone to the condition. Perhaps a more complete U of Maryland report mentions all this, but it doesn’t surface on the Web.

The University of Maryland project parallels “digital Sabbaths” staged by a group of Jewish artists, leading to the recent “National Day of Unplugging.” Mark Bittman wrote about “virtual breaks” in 2008; Merlin Mann and others have pointed out the interactive nature of email and social media time-wasting since 2006. Media reports on the U of Maryland project failed to note these contextually relevant facts, too.

Of course, social media withdrawal symptoms re not due to lack of  information access. Social media primarily concern phatic communication, reassurance. They may give you the sense that you are informed, but emphasis is on immediacy for the sake of contact itself. They are the new small talk, and facts are clearly secondary. Bottom line: you don’t necessarily learn more by being plugged in.

 

Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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Tags: addiction, day without media, Internet, journalism, media, mental health, social media, University of Maryland, unplugged, web, Web 2.0