Social Media Addiction
February 6, 2012
I am not sure I believe this story, but thar she blows: “Facebook and Twitter Are More Addictive Than cigarettes or Alcohol, Study Finds.” The Fox News writer has not spent much time with hard drug types so I suppose the omission to references to controlled substances is an indication of intelligent life. Here’s the passage I noted:
A team from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business recently conducted an experiment involving 205 people in Wurtzburg, Germany to analyze the addictive properties of social media and other vices.
Now that’s a real world institution for sure. What did the researchers “find”?
“Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success,” said Wilhelm Hofmann, the leader of team conducting the study. Hofmann suggests people may fail to resist social media so much because there is no obvious or immediate downside to checking services like Twitter or Facebook. He does warn that these services can ultimately be a huge drain on users’ time, however. “Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not ‘cost much’ to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist,” Hofmann said.
Wurtzburg is a long way from the goose pond. Chicago is about six hours by either air or auto. The goose is obviously to close to both the source of the data and the wizards who figured out that social media is worse than alcohol. Wow.
How would I search for this study? I would probably use the keywords specious, untenable, and statistically valid but conceptually flawed. Go University of Chicago. Get another Nobel Prize for this type of work.
Stephen E Arnold, February 6, 2012
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