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 turned itself into a full blown communication ‘tool’ that is used by businesses and political groups interested in conveying their message to the public. Part of my own online feed includes updates from Barrack Obama, Join the Coffee Party Movement, and Telling Fox News it’s Full of Crap, all organizations that very dear to my heart, and on my smart phone there is a square blue button which when I press it, helps me seize the moment and spread the news across the world.

But according to the University of Chicago, that blue button seems to be having a devastating effect on our life in 3-D. For some, only sleep and sex are more important.

This is probably nothing new to you, but still, I have a theory that I’d like to share. Often, when I am in a public area and see a person pull out their cell phone to answer a call or send a message, I notice how an invisible switch my brain gets set off, urging me to check up on my own status. I usually ignore that urge within (because I know that nobody contacts me), but ironically, I see how within seconds everyone else neaby has suddenly pulled out their cell phones as well to check up on their status. It’s almost as if this element of ‘sitting up and looking busy’ has mutated itself into a kind of fear where people, if they are unable to openly display just how important they are in life, feel hopelessly lost- hence the reason why he who gets phoned will immediately generate a trail of wannabees, and hence the reason why social networking has become so potent.

But I find the trend terribly annoying. Seriously, do people really have so many important things to say to each other, so much so that, during concerts, I have seen people- both in the audience and on stage- send text messages? I really don’t think so. Once I got really pissed off at a violinist who, while sitting next to me during a concert, kept on toggling his cell phone on and off with his toe. When I warned him that we really didn’t like having people use their phones during concerts, he explained to me that his wife was in the late stage of her pregnancy and that he wanted to be reachable in case an emergency popped up. Fair enough, I thought, except for the fact that his wife was in Hamburg and we were in Krakow, nearly 900 kilometers away.

That case alone confirms to me that the study by the University of Chicago is on to something. I suspect that there are many people out there who, if their iPhones and Blackberries were taken away from them, they would immediately go into withdrawal symptoms. Ironically, the report on ZDF ended with an invitation to a discussion forum about the issue on both its Facebook and Google+ pages. I think its safe to say that there is no turning back to the past anymore, and those of us who are damned to live with social networking’s grip need to understand that moderation is the key here.