Social Media Addiction essay - Opinions?

[The Riddler]

This is not any form of "The Arts", so please don't move it to Written.

So this is the essay our group member Kevin wrote, and I revised a little bit. Size 12 double spaced it comes out to 7 pages and change. Tell me what you think, what changes you would make, and any thing else I may want to know.

[spoiler=Warning tl;dr]   There are many different types of addictions out there. You could be hooked to drugs, on a certain type of drink, or even some sort of activity that you enjoy. However a new addiction, one more and more people find themselves apart of is the internet and social media. It may seem harmless to the world at large, but it can be a crippling social problem for those in its grip. I too once thought my flirtation with the online social network sites, like Facebook, and after trying to go cold turkey from the web I found out just how "addicted" I had become. After only two days my mind forced me to return to facebook to get my fix. Many people around the world are coming to this very realization and it is starting to become a very real problem.
   Social media addiction is very common in today's culture. Though some can control their urges, many if not most people are hooked to the entire idea of social media and networking. Rob relies on text messaging for communicating with his friends and family. He uses facebook for convenience, he meets new people through forums, and he plays with others on Xbox Live. When these forms of media are taken away from Rob, he becomes very anxious within one hour and even worse after an agonizing twelve hours. "I am the prime example of why social media addiction is a problem," he disappointedly admits.
   In order to understand how the prime targets of internet and social media addiction viewed this ever increasing problem we ventured out onto the Ammerman Campus and asked students their thoughts on the matter. We also posted questions online of the same nature to expand our reach and understanding. But, even this seemed to be lacking, so in order to fully understand if the answers we would received were in any way accurate, we engaged in a little experiment of our own. Rob Wassmuth, of course who is a stated social media addict, agreed to going cold turkey from his constant status updates and forum checking in order to document the affects it would have on his mind. At the same time Brian Coyle, who is completely unconnected to any social media site, agreed to create a Facebook and try to immerse himself into the virtual world.
   We posed a series of questions to students on the Ammerman Campus to see what they thought of this whole mess. When we asked if they considered themselves social media addicts, eight students answered no, with only three answering yes. This means that the majority of those we asked really aren't addicts or they are simply blind to their own problem, as I unfortunately found out about myself. The students were then asked if they could last an entire week without social media and the results were a bit divided, with six saying no and five saying yes that they could survive. These results read in the following way: Eight of the eleven don't believe they're addicts, but six of the eleven don't think they could last the week. Shouldn't the numbers be more even? It's a clear contradiction and supports the idea that these people don't realize they're addicted. They were then asked if in this day and age they considered internet and social media addiction to be a growing problem and the majority of those asked, seven to be exact, said that is was a serious future problem with only one dissenter saying no. We then changed the question slightly and asked if they considered internet/social media addiction an actual disorder, in comparison to other addictions (sex, drug, alcohol) and we had again seven saying yes and only one who said no. Two or three of the people even thought there may be a "Facebooker's Anonymous" some day. A few of the answers we got for the last two questions were rather evasive or vague, and since we didn't have the time to write down every word, we didn't include them in the data. The data seems to state that though they don't see themselves to be addicts, they see addiction itself to be a growing problem that we will one day have to face.
   As we moved on to the online poll results, the results seemed to be a little different. The majority of people who took the survey were utterly convinced they were not internet or social media addicts. Unlike our offline results, most said yes when asked if they could give up their media for an entire week, but you would be hard pressed to stop them from frittering away their time in order to take Facebook or online forum surveys. People today refuse to believe that they are addicted to the web but do say that such addictions are a huge growing problem. Perhaps all of these answers also point to the same conclusion. Maybe the fact that these people largely think that they are not addicted could be evidence that they are kidding themselves. Just as I failed to separate myself from the digital world when I was convinced I wasn't addicted, they might be unable to as well and learn the truth of their hidden disorder. Of course these are assumptions, and unfortunately we don't have the time or the convincing power to get these people to try going offline for a week. Because of these results, our experiments are all the more important.
   As part of our experiment to better understand the reasoning behind this growing addiction, Brian Coyle agreed to fully immerse himself into the social media sites. Our hopes were to see if he in any way becomes dependent on these sites and if it would affect his personal life in any way. At the beginning of the experiment Brian was asked to create a log so we could monitor his exposure. On Tuesday he wrote "Made a Facebook account today, I am not really into it, seems like a waste of time." He is completely uninterested in the entire social media scene, but as the week goes on Brian begins to accumulate friends and truly break the surface on the potentially addictive trap. "So far I have accumulated 33 friends, I liked and commented on about five of my friends statuses. Feeling kind of weird!" From there Brian seems to get even more interested and taking his trip into the web to a new level. "Browsed through my friends photo album today, liking and commenting on every one just to seem like a stalker, which now I am starting to feel like one." As he continues to log on to Facebook he slowly seems to be losing his resistance to the site and begins to show signs of being addicted. "I am starting to feel tedious. I wake up, turn on my computer, go on facebook, check my profile, and browse through the homepage to see what status I like. I feel lifeless!" As we feared the more and more a person immerses themselves into the social media scene, the more they want to check up on it and update it and it becomes second nature to them. This is just the beginning for Brian and hopefully he can kick this toxic habit.
   Rob Wassmuth, took this experiment to the polar opposite. While Brian indulged in the online life, Rob was told to stop using the internet and social media all together. Upon first hearing this his reaction was, "Hell no!" He claimed he wasn't addicted, but didn't like the idea of giving everything up for a week. After some coaxing he agreed and officially went cold turkey. He informed his friends that he would be going offline and could only be reached by phone call. He was also asked to keep a log of his experience in order to follow his progress to "rehabilitation". Almost immediately Rob started to feel some anxiety due to the loss of his fix. "Every time I look at my laptop I feel an urge to open it and go online. I've been able to fight it so far, but I don't know how long I can last. I sound so pathetic, am I really that addicted?" Just from the start Rob began to have signs of withdrawal. As though he was updating his Facebook statuses, he logged entries just about every hour stretching as far into the night at 4:04 AM. Rob also fought the urge to text message on his phone as it is technically a form of social media, "I got three separate texts today and I didn't read any of them. I feel like a jerk ignoring them. And to top it all off I'm sitting in my class without my laptop and it's killing me. I'm sitting here bored and it feels so weird." As time went on he tried to stay on his path but ffound the pressure to go online grew even greater. "This class is gosh darn boring, I want my laptop!" Rob began to show the same sort of symptoms that someone coming down off of any sort of drug would. Aside from his anxiety, he grew angry with his technology. Though he informed his friends that he would be offline, they continued to text message him. "I keep getting text messages and I can't take it. I got a message earlier and I threw my phone across the room." His logs get more aggressive as time passed. "This is really tough," becomes "this is really intercourse ing hard." He has become so dependent on the internet for everything he needed, that when it was taken away, his connection to the world was devastated. "When I got home I sat around with my brother and cousin and resisted the internet some more. It's just turning into torture." Rob is a classic example of what happens to people once they become fully immersed into the social media scene. It's such an easy way to connect to the world at large that it becomes almost second nature to some people. In fact, he slipped up once during his week. "Tonight I saw a friend of mine driving next to me, but she didn't see me. So when I reached the red light, I texted her on instinct. I realized immediately what I did after I clicked send and threw my phone in the back seat." Without the social media, some have a hard time readjusting to the old ways of public interaction. Rob claimed, "This would have been so much easier if I could have text messaged people. When I tried talking to people on the phone, there were always awkward silences and it sucked. Texting is just so much easier." In the end, Rob summed up his feelings about the whole situation. "I didn't realize how much it would actually affect me. I was anxious from the get go but I didn't realize it was this bad. This really might be a problem." Upon being told that he was allowed to go back online, a smile exploded across his face.
   Outside studies delve much further into the problem then we were able to. The Daily News wrote an article on how college students are addicted to social media and experience real withdrawal symptoms from it. They asked college students their thoughts on what if they lost their social media connection and to them it meant not just losing their connection to the news and social media, but to their friends and family as well. That online social sites were the main way they kept in contact with their loved ones meant there was little contact through other more personal means. The New York Times also performed an experiment that described a fourteen year old girl waking up in the morning and reaching for her phone the way a chain smoker would. They found that students will more often then not go into the bathroom just to text to their hearts content. They also did a study in Tokyo which showed the internet addiction to the extreme. Japanese on average spend ¥6,300 a month on cell phone bills according to household spending data released by the government. Many of their college students just can't seem to kick the habit and as a result continue to text and use social media when they go off to work, which is causing them to lose jobs at an accelerated rate. All of these point to a social media addiction that not only affects the United States but the whole world that now a days seems to be shrinking by the day.
   At the end of all of our experiments and surveys. the data had been brought together and the picture really became clear. People who are actively engaged in social media and the internet in large part refute that they themselves are addicted to it. Our offline surveys contradicted this by the fact that more than half do not believe they could last a week without their medias. Though our online survey results showed that people do believe they could last that week, this could be seen as iffy answers, because these people are in fact wasting their time online answering these surveys. As Rob Wassmuth shows us, saying it and doing it are two completely different things, and his log is a testament to the withdrawal symptoms many people would likely show as a result of losing their social media. This is not only a small view, but huge names like the Daily News and the New York Times have done extensive research on this topic in great detail and proved it is a huge looming problem for those who are completely submerged in social media and the internet. It's also very easy to get sucked into this phenomenon as Brian Coyle demonstrated. After only a few days of creating his Facebook, Brian began checking everything he could, commenting on pictures, checking statuses, and several other things he said before the experiment that he would never do or had no interest in.
   The internet has come a long way from it's humble origins in some government basement in the 60's. Billions of people now have access to the internet and that has shrunk the once enormous earth to just one click and your anywhere you want to be. People have found how easy this has made connecting to the rest of the world and embrace it without question. This has led to this new addiction to it and its social media sites. People who have this addictions do not even know or want to admit that they have it. They dilute themselves into thinking they don't have a problem and when that social media is gone its like their whole world shrinks. They feel anxious, nervous, angry, and isolated, which are all symptoms of withdrawal. It consumes your world so that for some it is their only link to the outside world. This scares me and it should scare everyone. Internet addiction is a real thing and unless we start taking real steps to address the problem it will only spread just as fast and you can click.[/spoiler]

[Dog Food]

[spoiler=Warning tl;dr]   There are many different types of addictions out there. You could be hooked to drugs, on a certain type of drink, or even some sort of activity that you enjoy. However a new addiction, one more and more people find themselves a part of, is the internet and social media. It may seem harmless to the world at large, but it can be a crippling social problem for those in its grip. I too once thought my flirtation with the online social network sites, like Facebook, and after trying to go cold turkey from the web I found out just how "addicted" I had become. (I think the writer forgot to add something in that sentence) After only two days my mind forced me to return to Facebook to get my fix. Many people around the world are coming to this very realization and it is starting to become a very real problem.
   Social media addiction is very common in today's culture. Though some can control their urges, many, if not most, people are hooked to the entire idea of social media and networking. Rob relies on text messaging for communicating with his friends and family. He uses Facebook for convenience, he meets new people through forums, and he plays with others on Xbox Live. When these forms of media are taken away from Rob, he becomes very anxious within one hour and even worse after an agonizing twelve hours. "I am the prime example of why social media addiction is a problem," he disappointedly admits.
   In order to understand how the prime targets of internet and social media addiction viewed this ever increasing problem we ventured out onto the Ammerman Campus and asked students their thoughts on the matter. We also posted questions online of the same nature to expand our reach and understanding. But, even this seemed to be lacking, so in order to fully understand if the answers we would received were in any way accurate, we engaged in a little experiment of our own. Rob Wassmuth, of course who is a stated social media addict, agreed to going cold turkey from his constant status updates and forum checking in order to document the affects it would have on his mind. At the same time Brian Coyle, who is completely unconnected to any social media site, agreed to create a Facebook and try to immerse himself into the virtual world.
   We posed a series of questions to students on the Ammerman Campus to see what they thought of this whole mess. When we asked if they considered themselves social media addicts, eight students answered no, with only three answering yes. This means that the majority of those we asked really aren't addicts or they are simply blind to their own problem, as I unfortunately found out about myself. The students were then asked if they could last an entire week without social media and the results were a bit divided, with six saying no and five saying yes that they could survive. These results read in the following way: Eight of the eleven don't believe they're addicts, but six of the eleven don't think they could last the week. Shouldn't the numbers be more even? It's a clear contradiction and supports the idea that these people don't realize they're addicted. They were then asked if in this day and age they considered internet and social media addiction to be a growing problem and the majority of those asked, seven to be exact, said that is was a serious future problem with only one dissenter saying no. We then changed the question slightly and asked if they considered internet/social media addiction an actual disorder, in comparison to other addictions (sex, drug, alcohol) and we had again seven saying yes and only one who said no. Two or three of the people even thought there may be a "Facebooker's Anonymous" some day. A few of the answers we got for the last two questions were rather evasive or vague, and since we didn't have the time to write down every word, we didn't include them in the data. The data seems to state that though they don't see themselves to be addicts, they see addiction itself to be a growing problem that we will one day have to face.
   As we moved on to the online poll results, the results seemed to be a little different. The majority of people who took the survey were utterly convinced they were not internet or social media addicts. Unlike our offline results, most said yes when asked if they could give up their media for an entire week, but you would be hard pressed to stop them from frittering away their time in order to take Facebook or online forum surveys. People today refuse to believe that they are addicted to the web but do say that such addictions are a huge growing problem. Perhaps all of these answers also point to the same conclusion. Maybe the fact that these people largely think that they are not addicted could be evidence that they are kidding themselves. Just as I failed to separate myself from the digital world when I was convinced I wasn't addicted, they might be unable to as well and learn the truth of their hidden disorder. Of course these are assumptions, and unfortunately we don't have the time or the convincing power to get these people to try going offline for a week. Because of these results, our experiments are all the more important.
   As part of our experiment to better understand the reasoning behind this growing addiction, Brian Coyle agreed to fully immerse himself into the social media sites. Our hopes were to see if he in any way becomes dependent on these sites and if it would affect his personal life in any way. At the beginning of the experiment Brian was asked to create a log so we could monitor his exposure. On Tuesday he wrote "Made a Facebook account today, I am not really into it, seems like a waste of time." He is completely uninterested in the entire social media scene, but as the week goes on Brian begins to accumulate friends and truly break the surface on the potentially addictive trap. "So far I have accumulated 33 friends, I liked and commented on about five of my friends statuses. Feeling kind of weird!" From there Brian seems to get even more interested and taking his trip into the web to a new level. "Browsed through my friends photo album today, liking and commenting on every one just to seem like a stalker, which now I am starting to feel like one." As he continues to log on to Facebook he slowly seems to be losing his resistance to the site and begins to show signs of being addicted. "I am starting to feel tedious. I wake up, turn on my computer, go on Facebook, check my profile, and browse through the homepage to see what status I like. I feel lifeless!" As we feared the more and more a person immerses themselves into the social media scene, the more they want to check up on it and update it and it becomes second nature to them. This is just the beginning for Brian and hopefully he can kick this toxic habit.
   Rob Wassmuth, took this experiment to the polar opposite. While Brian indulged in the online life, Rob was told to stop using the internet and social media all together. Upon first hearing this his reaction was, "Hell no!" He claimed he wasn't addicted, but didn't like the idea of giving everything up for a week. After some coaxing he agreed and officially went cold turkey. He informed his friends that he would be going offline and could only be reached by phone call. He was also asked to keep a log of his experience in order to follow his progress to "rehabilitation". Almost immediately Rob started to feel some anxiety due to the loss of his fix. "Every time I look at my laptop I feel an urge to open it and go online. I've been able to fight it so far, but I don't know how long I can last. I sound so pathetic, am I really that addicted?" Just from the start Rob began to have signs of withdrawal. As though he was updating his Facebook statuses, he logged entries just about every hour stretching as far into the night at 4:04 AM. Rob also fought the urge to text message on his phone as it is technically a form of social media, "I got three separate texts today and I didn't read any of them. I feel like a jerk ignoring them. And to top it all off I'm sitting in my class without my laptop and it's killing me. I'm sitting here bored and it feels so weird." As time went on he tried to stay on his path but ffound the pressure to go online grew even greater. "This class is gosh darn boring, I want my laptop!" Rob began to show the same sort of symptoms that someone coming down off of any sort of drug would. Aside from his anxiety, he grew angry with his technology. Though he informed his friends that he would be offline, they continued to text message him. "I keep getting text messages and I can't take it. I got a message earlier and I threw my phone across the room." His logs get more aggressive as time passed. "This is really tough," becomes "this is really intercourse ing hard." He has become so dependent on the internet for everything he needed, that when it was taken away, his connection to the world was devastated. "When I got home I sat around with my brother and cousin and resisted the internet some more. It's just turning into torture." Rob is a classic example of what happens to people once they become fully immersed into the social media scene. It's such an easy way to connect to the world at large that it becomes almost second nature to some people. In fact, he slipped up once during his week. "Tonight I saw a friend of mine driving next to me, but she didn't see me. So when I reached the red light, I texted her on instinct. I realized immediately what I did after I clicked send and threw my phone in the back seat." Without the social media, some have a hard time readjusting to the old ways of public interaction. Rob claimed, "This would have been so much easier if I could have text messaged people. When I tried talking to people on the phone, there were always awkward silences and it sucked. Texting is just so much easier." In the end, Rob summed up his feelings about the whole situation. "I didn't realize how much it would actually affect me. I was anxious from the get go but I didn't realize it was this bad. This really might be a problem." Upon being told that he was allowed to go back online, a smile exploded across his face.
   Outside studies delve much further into the problem then we were able to. The Daily News wrote an article on how college students are addicted to social media and experience real withdrawal symptoms from it. They asked college students their thoughts on what if they lost their social media connection and to them it meant not just losing their connection to the news and social media, but to their friends and family as well. That online social sites were the main way they kept in contact with their loved ones meant there was little contact through other more personal means. The New York Times also performed an experiment that described a fourteen year old girl waking up in the morning and reaching for her phone the way a chain smoker would. They found that students will more often then not go into the bathroom just to text to their hearts content. They also did a study in Tokyo which showed the internet addiction to the extreme. Japanese on average spend ¥6,300 a month on cell phone bills according to household spending data released by the government. Many of their college students just can't seem to kick the habit and as a result continue to text and use social media when they go off to work, which is causing them to lose jobs at an accelerated rate. All of these point to a social media addiction that not only affects the United States but the whole world that now a days seems to be shrinking by the day.
   At the end of all of our experiments and surveys. the data (period should be comma, I'm guessing) had been brought together and the picture really became clear. People who are actively engaged in social media and the internet in large part refute that they themselves are addicted to it. Our offline surveys contradicted this by the fact that more than half do not believe they could last a week without their medias. Though our online survey results showed that people do believe they could last that week, this could be seen as iffy answers, because these people are in fact wasting their time online answering these surveys. As Rob Wassmuth shows us, saying it and doing it are two completely different things, and his log is a testament to the withdrawal symptoms many people would likely show as a result of losing their social media. This is not only a small view, but huge names like the Daily News and the New York Times have done extensive research on this topic in great detail and proved it is a huge looming problem for those who are completely submerged in social media and the internet. It's also very easy to get sucked into this phenomenon as Brian Coyle demonstrated. After only a few days of creating his Facebook, Brian began checking everything he could, commenting on pictures, checking statuses, and several other things he said before the experiment that he would never do or had no interest in.
   The internet has come a long way from it's humble origins in some government basement in the 60's. Billions of people now have access to the internet and that has shrunk the once enormous earth to just one click and your anywhere you want to be. People have found how easy this has made connecting to the rest of the world and embrace it without question. This has led to this new addiction to it and its social media sites. People who have this addictions do not even know or want to admit that they have it. They dilute themselves into thinking they don't have a problem and when that social media is gone its like their whole world shrinks. They feel anxious, nervous, angry, and isolated, which are all symptoms of withdrawal. It consumes your world so that for some it is their only link to the outside world. This scares me and it should scare everyone. Internet addiction is a real thing and unless we start taking real steps to address the problem it will only spread just as fast and you can click.[/spoiler]

Didn't want to go all out on this thing, so I just fixed a few obvious errors. There are three things I bolded without fixing. Two of them are accompanied by me talking in italicizes, and the third one is the misspelled word "ffound". Might have been some tense contradictions, but I wasn't paying attention too much to it.

Anyway, interesting read, data-wise. Sounded pretty tough, too. I should have texted you, now that I know I might have been able to make you throw your phone against a wall.

[Mikoyan]

[spoiler] There are many different types of addictions out there. One could be hooked to drugs, certain type of drink, or even some sort of activity that he or she enjoys. However, a new addiction, one more and more people find themselves a part of, is social media and the internet. It may seem harmless to the world at large, but it can be a crippling social problem for those in its grip. I too once thought my flirtation with the online social network sites, like Facebook, and after trying to go cold turkey from the web, I found out just how "addicted" I had become. After only two days my mind forced me to return to Facebook to get my fix. Many people around the world are coming to this very realization, and it is starting to become a very real problem.
   Social media addiction is everywhere  in today's culture. Though some can control their urges, many, if not most, people are hooked to the entire idea of social media and networking. Rob relies on text messaging for communicating with his friends and family. He uses Facebook for convenience, meets new people through forums, and plays with others on Xbox Live. When these forms of electronic interaction were taken away from Rob, he became very anxious within one hour, and even more so after an agonizing twelve hours. "I am the prime example of why social media addiction is a problem," he disappointedly admits.
   In order to understand how the prime targets of internet and social media addiction viewed this ever increasing problem, we ventured out onto the Ammerman Campus and asked students their thoughts on the matter. We also posted questions online of the same nature to expand our reach and understanding. However, even this seemed to be lacking, so in order to fully know if the answers we would received were in any way accurate, we engaged in a little experiment of our own. Rob Wassmuth, who is a stated social media addict, agreed to going cold turkey from his constant status updates and forum checking in order to document the effects it would have on his mind. At the same time Brian Coyle, who is completely unconnected to any social media site, agreed to create a Facebook page and try to immerse himself into the virtual world.
   We posed a series of questions to students on the Ammerman Campus to see what they thought of this whole scenario. When we asked them if they considered themselves social media addicts, eight students answered no, with only three answering yes. This implies that the majority of those we asked were either not addicts or simply blind to their own problem, as I unfortunately found out about myself. The students were then asked if they could last an entire week without social media, and the results were a bit divided, with six saying no and five saying yes that they could survive. These results read in the following way: eight of the eleven do not believe that they are addicts, but six of the eleven do not think they could last the week. It would be a basic assumption that the numbers would be more even. It is a clear contradiction, and supports the idea that these people do not realize they are addicted. They were then asked if in this day and age they considered internet and social media addiction a growing problem, and the majority of those asked (seven to be exact) said that is was a serious future problem, with only one dissenter saying no. We then changed the question slightly and asked if they considered internet/social media addiction an actual disorder, in comparison to other addictions (sex, drug, alcohol) and we had again seven saying yes and only one saying no. Two or three of the people even thought there may be a "Facebooker's Anonymous" some day. A few of the answers we got for the last two questions were rather evasive or vague, and since we didn't have the time to write down every word, we didn't include them in the data. The data suggests that even though they don't see themselves as addicts, they see addiction to be a growing problem that we will one day have to face.
   As we moved on to the online poll results, the results seemed to be a little different. The majority of people who took the survey were utterly convinced they were not internet or social media addicts. Unlike our offline results, most said yes when asked if they could give up their media for an entire week, but one would be hard pressed to stop them from frittering away their time in order to take Facebook or online forum surveys. People today refuse to believe that they are addicted to the web, but do say that such addictions are a huge growing problem. Perhaps all of these answers also point to the same conclusion. Maybe the fact that these people largely think that they are not addicted could be evidence that they are kidding themselves. Just as I failed to separate myself from the digital world when I was convinced I wasn't addicted, they might be unable to as well and learn the truth of their hidden disorder. Although we do not have the time or the resources to conduct a full, controlled experiment, our results suggest that they may have the same problem that I had .
   As part of our experiment to better understand the reasoning behind this growing addiction, Brian Coyle agreed to fully immerse himself in the social media sites. Our hopes were to see if he in any way became dependent on these sites and if his dependency would affect his personal life in any way. At the beginning of the experiment Brian was asked to create a log so we could monitor his exposure. On Tuesday he wrote "Made a Facebook account today, I am not really into it, seems like a waste of time." He is completely uninterested in the entire social media scene, but as the week goes on Brian begins to accumulate friends and truly break the surface on the potentially addictive trap. "So far I have accumulated 33 friends, I liked and commented on about five of my friends statuses. Feeling kind of weird!" From there Brian appeared to get even more interested and took his trip into the web to a new level. "Browsed through my friends photo album today, liking and commenting on every one just to seem like a stalker, which now I am starting to feel like one." As he continued to log on to Facebook he slowly began to lose his resistance to the site and begins to show signs of addiction. "I am starting to feel tedious. I wake up, turn on my computer, go on facebook, check my profile, and browse through the homepage to see what status I like. I feel lifeless!" As we feared, the more and more a person immerses himself or herself into the social media scene, the more he or she wants to check on it and update, and it becomes second nature to him or her. This is just the beginning for Brian, and hopefully he can end this toxic habit.
   Rob Wassmuth, took this experiment to the polarend. While Brian indulged in the online life, Rob stopped using the internet and social media all together. Upon first hearing this, his reaction was, "Hell no!" He claimed he wasn't addicted, but didn't like the idea of giving everything up for a week. After some coaxing, he agreed and officially went cold turkey. He informed his friends that he would be going offline and could only be reached by phone. He was also asked to keep a log of his experience in order to follow his progress of "rehabilitation". Almost immediately, Rob started to feel some anxiety due to the loss of his fix. "Every time I look at my laptop I feel an urge to open it and go online. I've been able to fight it so far, but I don't know how long I can last. I sound so pathetic, am I really that addicted?" Just from the start Rob began to have signs of withdrawal. As though he was updating his Facebook statuses, he logged entries just about every hour stretching as far into the night at 4:04 AM. Rob also fought the urge to text message on his phone as it is technically a form of social media, "I got three separate texts today and I didn't read any of them. I feel like a jerk ignoring them. And to top it all off I'm sitting in my class without my laptop and it's killing me. I'm sitting here bored and it feels so weird." As time went on he tried to stay on his path but found the pressure to go online grew even greater. "This class is gosh darn boring, I want my laptop!" Rob began to show the same symptoms that someone coming off of any sort of drug would. Aside from his anxiety, he grew angry with his technology. Though he informed his friends that he would be offline, they continued to text message him. "I keep getting text messages and I can't take it. I got a message earlier and I threw my phone across the room." His logs got more aggressive as time passed. "This is really tough," became "this is really intercourse ing hard." He had become so dependent on the internet for everything he needed, that when it was taken away, his connection to the world was obliterated. "When I got home I sat around with my brother and cousin and resisted the internet some more. It's just turning into torture." Rob's experience is a classic example of what happens to people once they become fully immersed into the social media scene. It is such an easy way to connect to the world at large that it becomes almost second nature to some people. In fact, he slipped up once during his week. "Tonight I saw a friend of mine driving next to me, but she didn't see me. So when I reached the red light, I texted her on instinct. I realized immediately what I did after I clicked send and threw my phone in the back seat." Without social media, some have a hard time readjusting to the old ways of public interaction. Rob claimed, "This would have been so much easier if I could have text messaged people. When I tried talking to people on the phone, there were always awkward silences and it sucked. Texting is just so much easier." In the end, Rob summed up his feelings about the whole situation: "I didn't realize how much it would actually affect me. I was anxious from the get go but I didn't realize it was this bad. This really might be a problem." Upon being told that he was allowed to go back online, a smile exploded across his face.
   Outside studies delve much further into the problem then we were able to. The Daily News wrote an article on how college students are addicted to social media and experience real withdrawal symptoms from it. They asked college students about their thoughts on what would occur if they lost their social media connection, and to them it meant not just losing their connection to the news and networking, but to their friends and family as well. Those online social sites were the main way they kept in contact with their loved ones; there was otherwise little contact through other more personal means. The New York Times also performed an experiment that described a fourteen year old girl waking up in the morning and reaching for her phone the way a chain smoker would. They found that students will more often then not go into the bathroom just to text to their hearts content. They also did a study in Tokyo that showed internet addiction to the extreme. Japanese, on average, spend ¥6,300 (footnote this as "About $68 USD) a month on cell phone bills according to household spending data released by the government. Many of their college students just cannot seem to kick the habit and, as a result, continue to text and use social media when they go off to work, causing them to lose jobs at an accelerated rate. All of these point to a social media addiction that affects not only the United States but also the whole world that nowadays seems to be shrinking by the day.
   At the end of all of our experiments and surveys, the data had been brought together and the picture really became clear. People who are actively engaged in social media and the internet in large refute the notion that they themselves are addicted to it. Our offline surveys contradicted this by the fact that more than half did not believe they could last a week without their medias. Though our online survey results showed that people did believe they could last that week, this could be seen as unsubstantial answers because these people were in fact wasting their time online answering these surveys. As Rob Wassmuth showed us, saying it and doing it are two completely different things, and his log is a testament to the withdrawal symptoms many people would likely experience as a result of losing their social media. This is not only an individual view; reputable sources[/b]  like the Daily News and the New York Times have too done extensive research on this topic, and revealed that it is a huge looming problem for those who are completely immersed in social media and the internet. It's also very easy to get sucked into this phenomenon as Brian Coyle demonstrated. After only a few days of creating his Facebook, Brian began checking everything he could, commenting on pictures, checking statuses, and performing many other tasks he said before the experiment that he would never do or had no interest in.
   The internet has come a long way from its humble origins in some government basement in the 60's. Billions of people now have access to the internet, and that is continually making the world a smaller place. People have found how easy this has made connecting to the rest of the world, and embrace it without question. This has led to this new addiction to the network and social media. People who have these addictions do not even know or want to admit that they have it. They dilute themselves into thinking they do not have a problem and when that social media is gone its like their whole world shrinks. They feel anxious, nervous, angry, and isolated, which are all symptoms of withdrawal. It consumes their world so that for some it is their only link to the outside world. This scares me and it should scare everyone. Internet addiction is a real thing and, unless we start taking real steps to address the problem, it will only spread just as fast as one can click.
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Syntax check.

[Night the Lucario]

It seems to be an interesting article, but... frankly, I don't have a cellphone anyway, and I think I could do this, little to no problem. Although, unlike most people, the reason I haven't been addicted to various MMORPGs and their ilk is because I'm already addicted. To reading. So could that influence it? Perhaps. HArd to know.

[Shujinco2]

Damn, I wish I didn't have to go to school right now so I could read all of this. ;-;