More and more voices are wondering. And the words “addiction” and “detox” are coming quite often in discussions these days. Only a couple of hours ago at the Lift@home workshop on teens and technology, half of the panel of four were confessing to be “seriously addicted to Facebook”. Are we faced with a real (and seriously widespread) issue, or is this another one of these moments where, faced with a radically new balance, we temporarily lose footing while defining the new rules needed to survive life on the social web?

Check this recount of a Facebook and Twitter addict taking three month away from status updates:

This year, in my late-twenties, I set a resolution: for four months, until April 1st, I would turn away from Facebook and Twitter.  I had grown bored, obsessed, bothered, even – I admit it – enamored with my reflection there. [...]

“Information systems need to have information in order to run, but information under represents reality.”   I’m not my Facebook profile, nor am I a series of Twitter updates.  And the time I spend on these sites means I have less time to write fiction and converse with people in person, two things that make me feel most alive in the world. [...]

The problem of the internet– its power, and the way it’s changing how we live our lives–is a big topic these days.  There’s The Tyranny of Email: The Four-Thousand Year Journey to Your In-Box by John Freeman, and, forthcoming, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr.  The internet age is so young that we’re worried, and intrigued, by how it will shape us – we simply have no idea.

Link