Addicted to Facebook

It is hard to think of a product with a greater take up rate in human history than Facebook. Yes, the wheel was “liked” by many, fire caught on like…well…fire, and underwear once discovered has also found few (although notable) dissenters. In terms of sheer numbers though, Facebook is hard to beat. Since its inception in 2004 Facebook has risen to a subscriber list of more than 900 million users. Most of those users have logged on in the last four years and with its float on the New York stock exchange in May 2012, Facebook is valued at more than AUS $100 billion.

With so many users and such popularity it is no surprise that some people are addicted to Facebook and now psychologists have developed a simple scale to measure whether you are addicted or not.

Whatever you are addicted to, your addiction will have six core elements: salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict, and relapse. The researchers developed a series of questions to measure these elements that related to Facebook and gave those questions to Facebook users. Through trialling on hundreds of Facebookers they eventually honed the questions down to six that would identify those who are hooked on Facebook.

To see if you are addicted for each of the following questions, assuming you are a Facebook user, give one of the following five responses; very rarely, rarely, sometimes, often, or very often.

1. You spend a lot of time thinking about Facebook or planning how to use it.

2. You feel an urge to use Facebook more and more.

3. You use Facebook in order to forget about personal problems.

4. You have tried to cut down on the use of Facebook without success.

5. You become restless or troubled if you are prohibited from using Facebook.

6. You use Facebook so much that it has had a negative impact on your job/studies.

If you answer “often” or “very often” to four or more of these questions then you are addicted to Facebook, baby!

In further analysis the research found that people who are Facebook addicted are more likely to be neurotic and/or extroverted and they are less likely to be conscientious. People who are organised and ambitious tend not to become addicted to Facebook because they tend to use social media for work or networking. Women tend to be more at risk of Facebook addiction, probably because of its social nature, and Facebook addicts tend to go to bed late and get up late.

Of course, the next level of research needs to acknowledge that Facebook is more than a social media site. You can go there to gamble, watch videos, play games, and just massage your profile. So the question becomes is the Facebook addict addicted to Facebook or addicted to the internet? Maybe the even bigger question is whether society is addicted to the internet? The evidence is that we are, whether you “like” it or not.