Many people, including well-known ones, are addicted to social media. It seems like all the major companies have at least one social media page. Most of these pages have hundreds or thousands of fans and followers. And because everything is being published online, everything gets around. People don’t have to actually go somewhere to read what’s on their page, which makes it all that much more likely for them to pass it along to others.
Social media is just about everybody and everything being accessible to everyone. People are allowed to share anything they want and have it be instantly visible to the rest of the world. If it’s ugly or funny or embarrassing, it’s out there for all to see. The first rule of advertising, if it can be forgotten, is to make sure it isn’t everywhere. It’s another way to say that if it can be seen, then it probably isn’t worth showing to the world. Nobody likes to see advertisements, especially those that go on your Facebook wall, or in your emails.
There is an addiction to social media addiction. I guess it would be categorized as an addiction because technology has enough of a tendency to get away from people. There’s always something better out there, so why not keep using it? In this case, it goes the other way.
People who are not internet savvy find it hard to navigate and keep up with what everyone else is posting. They can’t keep up because they’re not paying attention to what everyone else is doing. It becomes almost a full time job keeping up with everything and finding new ways to share what you’ve found. There is also an addiction to seeing trends, trying to figure out who is the next big celebrity and trying to follow their career path. It’s almost like having a secret club of celebrities that you follow and comment on what they do and how they are leading their career.
I have this friend who was married once and now she spends most of her time at home. She still has her Twitter and Facebook accounts but most of the time, she gets on her laptop or tablet to do work. She doesn’t even leave the house to go out with her friends. She’s now completely closed off from the real world.
Another person shares this similar story: she’s a stay at home mom of six kids under the age of four. She still manages to post about her daily activities and run her business from home, but she finds it hard to stop herself from spending time on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, emailing and texting her friends. She feels guilty and tries to justify her time by saying she does it just for fun. She doesn’t realize that she’s becoming a prisoner to her own compulsions.
Addiction is like an addiction to food: you’ll eat everything in sight, no matter how bad you feel like you need to stop. Your mind doesn’t know the difference between what’s healthy for you and what’s not. It’s this addiction to something we strongly identify with – our true self – that makes people suffer in unhealthy ways.
Like an alcoholic, you can’t put a stop to your social media addiction because it links you to the real you. The only way to break the cycle of addiction is to get away from it for a while. Make sure you take away all your devices and isolate yourself for at least a few weeks. Doing so will help you change your outlook and realize that all the things you used to think were important are no longer important to you.
