The words Tweet, Facebook and Blackberry have become so commonplace that going a day without hearing or seeing these words is almost impossible. It dawned on me recently that I always fail to spend the whole day without logging on to Facebook or Twitter and this realisation has indeed triggered this blog post.  Are we really becoming social media junkies? And what could be the repercussions of “overdosing” on social media?

The word junkie loosely refers to a person addicted/dependent on a drug, in most instance heroin. In this instance, junkie will refer to an individual addicted/dependent on social media. I must concede though that using the word junkie might be inaccurate, but it does paint a close enough picture. A picture which shows how much the world has changed over the past decade or so, and how much, as a result, we have become dependent on the Internet and social media.

According to a new global study of university students by the International Center for Media and the Public Affairs (ICMPA) in partnership with the Salzburg Academy on Media  and Global Change, college students have revealed that they are, in fact, “addicted” to the Internet and social media in particular. The study, which was largely qualitative, polled close to 1,000 students in 10 countries on five continents including Chile to China, Lebanon, the USA, Uganda and the United Kingdom. The study put said students on a 24 hour “media fast,” in which no media or social media was to be used for the duration. Students were then asked to report their successes and failures of their abstinence. Some of the answers were shocking to say the least.

The students repeatedly used the term ‘addiction’ to speak about their dependence on social media.  “Media is my drug; without it I was lost,” said one student from the UK. “I am an addict. How could I survive 24 hours without it?”  Sharing analogies and metaphors made explicit the depths of their distress and likened their reactions to feelings of a drug withdrawal.  As a student from the USA noted: “I was itching, like a crackhead, because I could not use my phone.”

The students reported that media – especially their mobile phones – have literally become an extension of themselves. Going without media, therefore, made it seem like they had lost part of themselves. Just to latch on to this point, I would argue that we are now slowly identifying ourselves in terms of the media we consume. The offline and the online world are slowly but surely becoming one.

The question one needs to put across is whether or not this addiction is a problem? Is there anything such as a healthy addiction? My postulation is that there is no reason to fear. While doing anything in excess is never healthy, social media addiction on the other hand is not something to really worry about. I think we just have to look at the bright side and the good it can do in a society, take for example the uprisings in North Africa earlier in the year were social media played a pivotal role in mobilising protesters. For me really, as long as social media does not kill offline relationships, there is no reason to stress. Get addicted! Tweet hard!

Tags: #Drug, #Facebook addiction, #social media, #Twitter