Social Media - modern drug! Are you addicted?

We all belong to one or another social community, by becoming members we all contribute to social media market. Even enemies to the social community concept who describe social networks as the big evil are on these networks to conduct research and back their claims.

I came across social media in a period of my life when i felt lonely. I joined a social network to fill a vacuum I felt for social interaction. Wow, I couldn’t imagine the speed at which this virtual social world could absorb most of my personal life! How easily I began to share personal information, share photos and thoughts with others from all over the world I hadn’t met. But the experience was awesome! exciting and thrilling. I found out more about people by surfing their profiles than I could have learned by talking to them. I found a lot of people seemed to be living online, day and night actively participating in a virtual social life!

This raised questions in my mind. Why do we spend dozens of hours on Facebook, Twitter, MSN and other social networks? Why do we sacrifice precious time in the real world to chat with someone, comment on others posts, share files and participate in other activities without which we could survive and be happy? Why do these virtual worlds take permanent residence in our lives and hearts and seem to give us so much pleasure?

Maybe because building relationship online is interesting, easy and safe. We can realize and position ourself in any style, we can be whoever we want in virtual life who we scare or cannot be in real life due to our complexes, appearance or other barriers.

One of American’s philosopher John Dewey said “the deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be important”. We all want to be important, all of us crave appreciation, like food or sleep - this is what we always want; I found out that social community is one of the easiest and fast way to be heard and receive a feedback. And when we realize that people reacting to our online activities it bringing us incredible happiness and encourage us to invest more to online social life.

Another important factor is curiosity. Curiosity is human nature. We are SO curious about others! There is pleasure in discussing the latest gossip. Social communities are great places to learn what other people do, who they connect to, what their interests are, where they live and what they think about.

What else? Is that it? Is it only curiosity, boredom or simply a hobby that can be fulfilled on social communities? Or maybe it is something more than just time wasting?...

Just look at these statistics:

13 hours of videos uploaded to youtube every minute, 100,000,000 videos viewed everyday, and you will need 412.3 years to watch all of these videos;

3,000,000 tweets per day on Twitter;

500,000,000 active Facebook users who share 1,000,000,000 content object every week;

By 2014 nearly two-thirds of all internet users in world will be regular users of social networks.

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