Social Media Addiction – how much time do you spend in?

“If I’m not using Twitter, I’m sleeping” – showed the twitter timeline in my MetroTwitApp some months ago. Yup, it is a syndrome now. I have never thought I’d spend thousands of hours in Social Networking sites in just few months. So, what is “Social Media Addiction” and why the hell is it here corrupting my mind time and again? In my perspective, this is all what users’ behavior and consumption of information in the social web space has to do with. I have been using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn for years and lately Google+and consider myself an addict, but the study says something else, they are more detrimental towards their findings for us – without letting user to define their own custom definition of addiction.

8578 – How much time have you in Facebook in past one month? That 4 digit number is the minutes that I spent in last six month. Another 5987 in twitter. Of course, the overlap is there. NaturalNews.com says social media addiction can ruin your health, ie it keep on propelling thoughts on constant updating of Facebook status and twittering your moves. While Brainlogger writes in their psychology and psychiatry category that social network addiction is a scientific no man’s land (?). Sadly, I aint to these points. Brainlogger, however, have a list of good references to social media addiction researches and studies on this article. Social Times, on the other hand, points out 5 ways to fight social media addiction, citing – focus, culling your network, using lists and filters, using a schedule, and setting a time – and none of these are really our brain washer.  If you want to hack your life, real addiction and distraction from social networking, then you might want to manage your social network addiction from points which Stepcase lifehack has pointed here.

The researchers in this field tend to define social media addiction as those who spend more than 4 hours continuously in Facebook or similar social networking sites, pointing at increased level depression and low self-esteem. And I don’t agree to it at all, and am glad that I’m not an addict according to these guys. FTAD (Facebook and Twitter Addiction Disorder – generous keyword borned from the research labs) is now pandemic, does this mean Google+ is going to be even more pandemic? (Just a curiosity)

Using Google Docs Spreadsheet, I have been analyzing my social media usage over the past six months (February till July 2011), while I still don’t boost of loosing my previous time simply because I’m habituated to it. Plus, there are no any trends on my usage, it is simply a planar usage policy that keeps on going. My Social Media Addiction – Addiction that continues without any trend, is interactively illustrated here.

The area chart is plotted with amount of time spend versus the date line of six months – while some data are approximated. Others in the chart represent my usage of LinkedIn, Google+, Twitterfeed. Excluded is the Youtube and few others. The representation is solely for my personal purpose. BTW, this article was not intened to be about social media addiction, but about my usage and trend of using social media sites.