addiction to social networking

A social networking service is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, e.g., who share interests and/or activities.(Wikipedia)

A more general definition of social networking would be, that it is in fact the grouping of individuals into specific groups, like small rural communities or a neighborhood subdivision. But the main focus of this hub is on the online social networking. Popular social networking sites are free to use. Social networks are a mainstream medium for millions of people including children teens and adults from all around the world. Social networks encourage and enable people to exchange information about themselves, share pictures or videos, and use blogs and private messaging to communicate with friends, they even allow you to share your relationship status, likes and interests with your friends and sometimes even with the people you don’t even know.

Millions maybe billions use social networking sites. According to one of the most famous social network amongst all “Facebook” , has 500 million members worldwide who, collectively, spend 700 billion minutes per month, checking in with friends, writing on people’s electronic walls, clicking through photos and generally keeping pace with the drift of their social world”(Facebock,2011). There are tons of other social sites delivering the similar services.

I too use Facebook regularly, and it really helps you staying connected with your friends and your “Facebook friends”. Though facebook and other social networking sites are even useful in certain ways, i.e You don’t have to remember the birthdays of your friends (that’s the best thing about them), you can see who is your friend’s friend, And similar things. But is it really worth spending 700 billion minutes per month? And that is approximately 24 hours per member. Not to mention it’s the average time spent by 500 million, and active users usually spend much more than that.

Few days back I saw an app on facebook which tells you how many hours do you spend on facebook daily, and I was astonished by the results, most of my friends were using facebook more than 3 hrs daily, and there were some real winners I had in my friends list, and they were using it for more than 5 hours on daily basis. Though I can’t say how accurate that app was, but it actually gave me an idea of increasing issue of social networking addiction.

How to tell if you are addicted to social networking

Looking at the statistics, addiction to social networking is spreading like a disease. Though I have mentioned that it has its benefits, but excess of anything is bad. So we can’t just ignore how we’re wasting our lives by tweeting and sharing it to our wall or discussion board. We need to look at how are we wasting our time on social networks.

Personally, I waste most of my time doing this. Seriously I don’t know what keeps bugging me if I don’t see my wall for like 10 hrs. And there I’ll look for any new notification or a tweet whether it is about a friend posting a stupid comment on a picture of another friend on which I have made a comment few days back, or a friend posting a link or a picture in which he has tagged me for seemingly no reason.

It does not actually take much time, but sometimes causes distraction amidst something more important like a class if you’re a student, or during your work hours.

Well I too had a tendency for playing such useless games once I started using facebook. It becomes your daily routine to spend much of your valuable time on such activities. Seriously who gives a damn about your mobwars or mafiawars level or how many cattle do you have in your virtual farm. Or how much money do you make in a game. But yet we play it and even give importance to the score we make.

This is one of the most time wasting activity on social networks. And if you are addicted to such an app you certainly need to tell yourself “to get a life”.

This doesn’t happen too often but if you’re determined to sit in front of your computer or PDA etc. for no reason you can do this. Exploring albums of your friends (and by friends I mean friends not only on facebook) , make sense. But sometimes we start to explore a person’s photo albums or profile we barely have any interest in.

As I’ve said it doesn’t happen very often, but still is a factor but not too hard to avoid unless you are severely addicted to social networking .

This really is a thing on which you can spend most of you’re time while using a social networking site. Though we have alternate websites for video sharing and watching, and for this reason this one is listed at no.4, but we also want to see what our friends suggested us to see. So if you are a victim of social networking addiction you can spend a lot of time doing this.

Hence there are tons of ways provided on social networks for you to waste your time. But it is up to you, either you use it wisely and for good reasons only or you become a tool for such websites of making revenue while you get nothing but waste of time in return.

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