Are We REALLY Addicted To Social Media? [Infographic]

We see it in tweets all the time. People send things like, “I’m a Twitterholic” or “I invite you to a Twitterholic Anonymous meeting.” Most of us, or at least most of the people I know, either love their Facebook or their Twitter, and they check in on those sites every day.

I’ve always thought it was funny. I know for me, I send about 70 tweets each day. It’s a lot. I barely use my iPhone for talking, but I have Tweetdeck installed on it, and I check it constantly. If I’m awake, I’m on Twitter. It’s a way of life for me and has been for a while. I can’t imagine it any other way.

However, the other day my friend @jaycbee tweeted an article that got me thinking about this a little more. Life After Twitter is a simple but compelling blog post about someone’s life after they decided to break up with Twitter. It even references an article on The New Yorker about how Twitter addiction is very similar to drug addiction.

Is it possible that Twitter and Facebook are so much a part of our lives that they actually interfere with things that should be more important to us? Who’s to say what should be important to us anyway? It’s our life, and we can choose to spend our time how we want, right? Or, is that the same kind of justification a person might use who has other legitimate addictions? I’ve already written about how I sleep with my phone and check Twitter throughout the night, and to my surprise, based on the comments on that article, lots of people do the same thing!

You know me, and when I ask myself these kinds of questions, I go into a researching frenzy, which I did today. I found this very interesting Flowtown infographic which gives us some insight on social media addiction. Apparently, based on this, some people can be interrupted during sex, while in the bathroom, while during a meal and while in a meeting by their social media habit. I guess that isn’t too shocking, after all, my sleep is interrupted almost every night by it.

After reading that profound post and seeing this infographic, I’ve determined that it’s a personal decision really. For me, I could compose a convincing argument for why Twitter is very good and very bad in my own life. I guess like everything else, it comes down to the daily choices we make in every moment. For now, I’m choosing to live my life constantly connected to social media. I don’t know what the future holds, but right now, this is my “real life,” and I’m sticking to it. :)