![]() The workstation is more of a challenge, as I spend most of my time working in the Chrome browser. I don’t run any social media apps for the most part anyway, so I just removed Imgur. So, I had a couple of issues to resolve if I wanted to break the cycle of addiction one more time. They thought they picked up their phones half as much as they actually did.”įor me, using my phone was one part of the issue, but the primary screen I interact with is my Mac workstation. Just as revealing: The users weren’t fully aware of how addicted they were. Most of these interactions were for less than 30 seconds, but they add up. “A small but detailed 2015 study of young adults found that participants were using their phones five hours a day, at 85 separate times. I knew I was dropping out of flow state when checking the socials, but it seemed like checking here and there shouldn’t have been so impactful. I’d grind away for ten or more hours with seemingly little to show for it. I knew I was going through days of not getting nearly as much done as I thought I should have. And the engagement never ends.”Įven more disturbing, I’m not entirely certain how addicted I was. No information technology ever had this depth of knowledge of its consumers - or greater capacity to tweak their synapses to keep them engaged. ![]() Silicon Valley’s technologists and their ever-perfecting algorithms have discovered the form of bait that will have you jumping like a witless minnow. “Do not flatter yourself in thinking that you have much control over which temptations you click on. Andrew Sullivan wrote the following in New York Magazine. It’s not merely a recreational activity that an unfortunate few lose control of like compulsive gamblers or alcoholics who can’t tame their vices. Social media is meant to hook you and compel you to click. Lest you think I’m just a whiny bugger with a personal problem, the issue is far deeper. Interruption takes me out of flow, reducing productivity for the day. It’s also the issue of interrupting whatever it was that I was working on. There’s a compulsion that would drive me to fire up Tweetdeck and check out all of my carefully curated columns, review mentions, and review performance statistics. Addiction, for me, means using social media when I didn’t plan to. Using social media in the context of addiction is subtly different from simply wasting time. My use of Imgur was also obsessive, opening the app on my phone multiple times per day and scrolling, scrolling, scrolling while looking for new fodder. I’ve been through this with Twitter off and on for many years now. This led to the familiar cycle of Internet addiction. I was also spending a lot of time composing tweets and checking reactions. I was spending a lot of time on Imgur seeking inspiration. That game was successful, in that I had many tweets that were liked and/or retweeted dozens or, in a few cases, hundreds of times. ![]() It became a game to see what tweets I could create that people would find funny. During the last month or two, I’d gotten into a habit of trawling through Imgur, looking for memes I could spin into humorous tweets about networking. ![]()
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