Kick the Digital Drug Habit

I hate Facebook. I use it for shameless self-promotion but I still hate it.  The pages on their own are ok but so many misuse it in so many ways. Over-sharing is probably the worst offense. I mean, I love hearing what’s going on with members of my family but I really don’t need to know they are going to a movie, watching a movie, really enjoying the movie and then coming home from the movie all with attached selfies.

Face in a Book magnets and more are available in the online store.
Face in a Book magnets and more are available in the online store.

Facebook can be amazingly useful too. In fact it probably saved my mother-in-law’s life. One morning her furnace quit working. It was getting cold and it just happened that neither my wife nor I was carrying our cell phones when she tried to call. So she went to Facebook and told the world that the furnace was broke. Her grand-daughter saw the Facebook page and then came over and got us so we could call the repair man. Now this of course was a very good thing. The bad part came when everyone in the family saw the page and gave us grief for not being at grandma’s beck and call. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.

But studies show that using social media can be habit-forming, even addictive. I know some who leave it open on their computer 100% of the time, playing seven games of Scrabble simultaneously. When I see folks like this I worry that  maybe they should be doing other things, like reading a book.  Now I’m not suggesting being a total Luddite, I do use a Kindle. The last time I tried to read a regular book the first thing I did was to unsuccessfully look for the button to make the text larger. But the important part is getting away from reading social media and read a book, e-reader or even a graphic novel instead.