Give it up for Lent!

Written Mar 8; published after Second Sunday of Lent.

Why did I decide to give up social media for Lent? My wife thinks I spend too much time on social media.  I've got a reputation among my friends that I'm either a social media whiz or I'm obsessed.

The purpose of giving up something for Lent is to examine that something's role in your life. What it means to you, what it does to you.

So I'm three days in to my social media fast.

Confession: "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been years since my last confession." I've checked social media every day since Ash Wednesday, but I haven't posted.  That's not really giving it up.

Lent's also a time for self-reflection about our mortality and our imperfections. So, a reflection on my prodigal social media use:

First time to check social media: I wondered if anyone noticed me missing.  A friend, when told F2F about my social media fast, said, "how am I going to find out about all the stuff I need to know!" Facebook friends acknowledged my fast, one saying that she might do it too.  My thought response, "Why would you want to do a thing like that since social media is your job?"

Second check came when I wanted to read something.  I don't have a book right now that I'm into.  A lot of my Twitter feed is news sources, arts/culture magazines, and educational blogs.  I tried going to individual web sites, but couldn't remember them all.  So I checked Twitter to see what's there that's worth reading.  

Down the rabbit hole! I've got personal interests and work interests mixed in my account.  So one use of Twitter is to keep up with professional reading.  Maybe I ought to separate business from pleasure.

After an hour on Twitter, I recognized that familiar hypnotic tunnel-vision that I get when I am immersed in social media.  It's a pleasant dissociation from the world around me in which I am not aware of time or place or people around me.  A lot like going into IKEA.  A time-suck. That's the type of social media immersion that family members find annoying.  They find my time in IKEA annoying, too.

Third check in three days--an hour and half disappeared.  I read some NYTimes articles, checked mentions, read some other articles, again the pleasant dissociation that is so addictive.

Characteristics of Internet Addiction
Young (1996) validated the first assessment of problematic use of internet that resulted in impairment in school, work or interpersonal domains. Respondents who answered "Yes" to five or more criteria were considered dependent Internet users. Dependent users, on average, spend between 30-46 hours per week engaged in internet use for pleasure, compared to non-dependent users who spent between 1-9 hours per week.  Dependents were more likely to use highly interactive mediums such as chat rooms, discussion boards, bulletin boards, news groups, and multi-user character sites.  

The use of multi-user sites in character or avatar was a distinctive use of the internet by dependents (28%), not often utilized by non-dependents (5%).  Dependents used interactive applications in general more frequently than non-dependents to broaden their social network through the formation of on-line relationships.  

It will take later research will clarify if those more dense on-line relationships displaces relationships in the real world. But that's not where the research attention went. The next line of research was to determine if "it is a thing," does internet addiction really exist?

Many of the assessments of problematic internet use employed vague terms "problematic use" that need a lot of interpretation, and self-report of a behavior that the subject may not be fully aware of or may minimize.  The various instrument development studies converged on four factors that characterize problematic internet use: 1) absorption (over-involvement with the Internet, time management failure); 2) negative consequences (distress in domains of social relationships, work, or school); 3) sleep (i.e., sleep pattern disruption like scheduling sleep around online time); 4) deception (lying to others online about online identity, or how long they spend online; Rotunda, Kass, Sutton and Leon, 2003).

Widyanto & Griffiths (2006) reviews the research to conclude that if it exists, it only affects less than 1% of the population.  Griffiths (2000) argues that most of the individuals who use the Internet excessively use it to fuel other addictions; the internet is simply the place they have chosen to conduct their chosen addiction. That sounds to me suspiciously like the mantra "guns don't kill people, people do."  Some compulsions that are expressed on the internet do so because the internet is anonymous, impersonal, and disinhibiting; they wouldn't exist in the real world because the individual loses the anonymity, encounters personal relationships, and responds to social inhibitions.

BRINGING IT HOME: Does my leisure internet use approach any of these characteristics of problematic use? Nah! before I gave it up for Lent, my overly helpful smart phone's weekly report of non-email internet use was always in the range of 2.5--3 hours.  The pattern was usually two or three 45 min to 1-hr binges. During those binges, I certainly experienced the absorption and time distortion, but never experienced sleep disturbances (I love my sleep). Negative consequences in relationships, hmmm, maybe, since that was the prime motivation behind giving it up for Lent, but those social influences consisted of mild teasing or comments. Deception, not really, the reality of time online is far less than the perception, so I'll report my weekly online time as evidence that I'm not on it that much.

So, I conclude that I'm not addicted to the internet. However,  I do use the internet as a way to cocoon myself after a day or week of social stresses.  As a natural introvert, I use social withdrawal to recharge, and browsing the internet for interesting readings, say, about internet addiction research, or, (like yesterday) about characteristics of Millennial generation in higher education, is restorative for me. In that function, my internet use advances my professional life of an academic scholar.

Or is that denial rationalizing my compulsion?! You can never win in that "Is-it-really-denial" game.

___________________________



Christakis, D. A. (2010). Internet addiction: a 21 st century epidemic?. BMC medicine, 8(1), 61.
Griffiths, M. D. (2000) Internet addiction—Time to be taken seriously? Addiction Research, 8, 413–
418.
Rotunda, R. J., Kass, S. J., Sutton, M. A., & Leon, D. T. (2003). Internet use and misuse: Preliminary
findings from a new assessment instrument. Behavior Modification, 27, 484–504.
Widyanto, L., & Griffiths, M. (2006). ‘Internet addiction’: a critical review. International Journal of mental health and Addiction, 4(1), 31-51.Young, K. (1996). Internet addiction: The emergence of a new clinical disorder.  CyberPsychology and Behavior, 1, 237-244.
Sorry, citing references is an occupational side-effect.