Drugged by Facebook
ZDF, Germany’s second public television station, posted an alarming headline on its website a few days ago. “(Networking) is potentially more addictive than cigarettes +and alcohol,” it warned. “Facebook and Twitter can induce stress and endanger a person’s health.” Not that this new is anything new; I think we suspected that all along, but it does cast an eerie shadow over social networking sites, which have been taking the world by storm. The thing that worries me is this: We have come to rely so heavily on social networking in the past several years that Facebook, with its more than 800,000,000 members, is now ranked by Alexa as second most visited site on the world wide web (Twitter, with 300,000,000 users is ranked ninth). Those who use Facebook regularly know how it has developed itself over the years. No longer an odd online meeting point where people ‘poked’ each other and played Farmville (something that I never could understand) Mark Zuckerberg’s school project has t...
