Slashdot Mirror
Study Finds Social Media Harder To Resist Than Cigarettes, Alcohol
An anonymous reader writes "Checking a Twitter, Facebook or email account for updates may be more tempting than alcohol and cigarettes, according to researchers who tried to measure how well people regulate their daily desires. Researchers also found that while sleep and sex may be stronger urges than certain drug addictions, people are more likely to give in to their addiction to use social or other types of media."
...is what my mom told me about alcohol and tobacco.
also, checking constantly to see if anybody replied to my slashdot posts. also, looking for new articles to claim frist! addictive.
That happened.
Cause all my AA meetings are on Facebook!!!
Does this mean that social media will now be the blame for all the evils of society? Finally replacing D&D, and "violent video games."
Om, nomnomnom...
Back when I waited tables in a restaurants to pay for college, I can promise you me and the other servers were not taking Facebook breaks outside the back door.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
I can not press "submit" on this post. Really. I *can* not press submit. Really I can....
Tax social media to the extent they tax alcohol and tobacco and then see how easy it is to give up.
... don't join:
http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6611967/not-google-plus
It's really efficient having no friends. Now, you know what I cannot resist, however? Lesbian porn.
The pretense behind this study seems rather shallow. "Social media" is really nothing more than a way for people to keep in touch with friends and family. I can go to ONE website and see how my daughter, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends are doing. It's very convenient. And yes, I check it throughout the day. If that's an "addiction", it's a pretty good one to have.
Oh yes, please, please, _please_ start the war on social media and make drugs, poverty and terrorism legal.
Governments have been taxing alcohol for centuries and tobacco for decades and it hasn't stopped people from using either one of them. Anybody who thinks that taxing something that people like is going to make them stop must be suffering from the Bullwinkle Syndrome.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Ha! I don't drink smoke or do any drugs or have a face book account! I am immune to such temptations! muhahaha.
Checking a slashdot for updates may be more tempting than alcohol and cigarettes...
So sleeping is an addicting activity and anyone doing is just giving into a base desire?
Don't know why this study did not include breathing, I know some air addicts that cannot stop breathing for more then a minute. They are so addicted they even do it in their sleep.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Do people generally view social media as more destructive than other addictions such as cigarettes or alcohol? Some may regulate their addictions to cigarettes or alcohol because of their destructive effects on health or general productivity. Does the overall decrease in productivity from social media such as facebook, youtube, or twitter count for more than the decrease in productivity from drinking or smoke breaks? What about the effects of liver/lung damage?
/. is an addiction.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Narcissism is a powerful force, as is "sense of belonging" 2 things FB feeds quite well regardless of the reality.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
These idiots have obviously never been addicted to alcohol or cigarettes.
Sleep is pretty hard to resist. If you don't do it, you die.
Not really the same as cigarettes?
..don't panic
it can be more poisoning to your well-being than either...
I don't think this is a sane post. It reads like one of those self help groups ...
The purpose of existence is to make money.
kill everyone who is for these stupid taxes
Yes, I'm sure taxing users to access slashdot will go down well. I doubt it would have much effect on traffic either.
It's a money game, not politicians trying to help people.
As a douchebag politician you get to stand in front of everyone with a straight face and say it's because those vices are bad for you and you want to discourage it. What you're really doing is using addictions to collect massive amounts of revenue. Even better, nobody can argue with you, or they're some monster supporting alcohol and nicotine addiction.
This is why a $3 pack of cigarettes in a major city can cost $12, while people still smoke.
vegetables. Huh, weird how it doesn't sound like a bad thing when the thing you're comparing it too doesn't have negative connotations.
After using Facebook for 3 years I recently deleted my account.
They require you to wait 14 days before the actual cancellation takes place, maybe most people who try to resist to the temptation to use FB are felled by this grace period.
It obviously acts as a secure way to make deletions, in case someones account is hacked, but still.
200 people does not define if a compulsion of narcissistic value is harder to resist than alcohol. Case in point: all the photos of people drinking on Facebook. Seriously? 200? WTF, this isn't a study, it's a P.O.S. scheme to try and get more so-called psychologists books sold and whatnot.
Also, lets not get "social media" and "social networking" confused; they are two different things: media being the advertising venue and promotion of products and services; networking being the thing that's useful out of these tools.
Fuck this study, it was worthless and measures nothing but 200 people's behavior.
Underwear beat a city? WTF?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Can we quit pretending that addiction is a one dimensional thing? There are many factors that go into an addiction. For example, most people that I know smoke have some desire to quit smoking because they feel less healthy. Most people that I know that use facebook don't really have a desire to quit using facebook.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Now I really want a drink and a smoke.
Yes, social is addicting. Should it still be vilified? Last time I checked, you can't die from it (fringe serial killers aside)!!
Lock the researchers in soliatary confinement, you know so they won't be afflicted by the addiction of human interaction...
This study was clearly idiocy.
The study only asked if the participant had experienced an urge to go on a "social media" website. They didn't test whether the participants wanted not to go on and ultimately did, which is the definition of "giving in". It also didn't test whether this affected the quality of life of the participant, which is (somewhat) the definition of a problem.
air, water, food, companionship... I'm an addict really...
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
A sin tax error...
"Democracy." It's just a slogan.
Crackbook Anonymous.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Except I don't want to resist booze.
Now excuse me while I grab a shot.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
I found it actually quite very easy to resist social media despite the article mumbo-jumbo "magical" statistics easiest example... When my grandmother died, I posted the news on facebook. One would think that their would of been remorseful replies but instead all I got was a free cow, and no replies. All my former classmates, family, and so callled "facebook Friends" didn't reply at all. I later cancelled my account. Social media lacks the REAL personal influence. It is merely a glass surface many do not see past the surface or how frail it can be when arduous times arise.
People are more likely to give in to ordinary things which have no negative side-effects than harddrugs?
Who would have thought.
In completely unrelated news, people are more likely to masturbate than murder.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
chup tu vui ve
Correlation does not imply causation. The smokers and drinkers among the working poor fuck themselves.
Targeting one group is not an implicit targeting of another, loosely correlated, group. To suggest that sin taxes are taxes on the working poor is to suggest that either (1) the working poor are predisposed to smoking, drinking and gambling; or (2) that smokers, drinkers and gamblers are predisposed to being poor.
A tax on cell phone service is not a tax on cancer patients; tough on drugs is not tough on black people; preventing people from making a mess in a public park is not preventing people from exercising free speech; and requesting picture ID at a poling place is not requesting that the poor stay home on election day.
From TFS:
people are more likely to give in to their addiction to use social or other types of media
It may be simply because they're less dangerous than cigarettes and alcohol, so there's less reason to resist.
Drunk twittering is a life ruiner.
It will be added to the list. There's always more room for more needlessly vilified social habits.
Wanna be they add this shit to their quackery?
now if i could only stop drinkings so much beer.(10 16 ounce beers a day... maybe more.... ya i need to go to a meeting).... ya.... social media easy. what is facebook havent had it for a month cause i get drunk and post then delete so ya easy to get rid of it hold on a second need a drink...... okay back what was i saying?
It just goes to show, in the 21st century "Facebook is the Opium of the people".
It can not be true. I didn't even check /. today. I never even missed it.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Checking a Twitter, Facebook or email account for updates may be more tempting than alcohol and cigarettes,
But not more tempting than crack.
I think that was grandparent poster's point: if people stop using social media because it's taxed, it clearly isn't as addictive as alcohol and tobacco.
There is, of course, a slight problem with this. Unless you put in a lot of effort to make your own, you'll have to pay for the alcohol and tobacco anyway, so adding taxing increases the cost by a non-infinite proportion.
really? lets see about that :)
Don't forget to blame Ozzy. He was a pet whipping boy for the "evils of society" a few years ago, too.
And dancing. Dancing is bad, m'kay?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
When I'm expecting a reply to an urgent enquiry or something I'll regularly check my email account (and by regularly I mean maybe every hour or so) but I have absolutely zero interest in Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, et al, and never have.
Slashdot is the closest I've ever really come to an interest in anything like online social media.
Are people desperately starved for attention or something? Is narcissism becoming more prevalent, or is the existing level of latent self-absorbtion just more "enabled" by technology?
You can't die from gambling addiction as well. So?
When you neglect studies/work/feeding your cat/baby/yourself for Internet, it's not healthy.
...welcome our new social media overlords
"It seems that we are at the age where life stops giving us things, and starts taking them away..." Indiana Jones
I'm SO going to have to post this to my FB page!
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
Will be linked to Slashdot.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Are required for work. Give me $x billion and I am more than happy to stop using email.
New Economic Perspectives
I believe this is perfectly illustrated here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALbH63Ali9U
that smokers, drinkers and gamblers are predisposed to ...
predisposed to addictive behavior, which (inevitably?) leads to poverty.
Let me propose a science experiment. Past evidence indicates an insane high correlation between smoking, drinking, and gambling... simply walk thru a casino and look around... My hypothesis is that a modern casino either is full of people checking their FB status on their smartphone, or there are preconditions that prevent it like installation of phone jammers, or a posted rule that phones are not allowed to prevent cheating or card counting or some BS which is really to force addictive behavior into more profitable channels like gambling, smoking, drinking, etc.
There seems to be a reasonable realistic theory, and its certainly a falsifiable experiment... anyone out there who works in/near/around a casino, or perhaps went to defcon recently (I haven't been to any cons since like the 90s other than HOPE once in the 00s and smartphones were not popular then)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
To suggest that sin taxes are taxes on the working poor is to suggest that either (1) the working poor are predisposed to smoking, drinking and gambling; or (2) that smokers, drinkers and gamblers are predisposed to being poor.
These are both true, and it's a situation which ensures the poor stay poor. Paradoxically, this is because smoking, drinking, gambling, (and drugs) are cheap when compared with healthier forms of entertainment. A packet of cigarettes and a bottle of whiskey is cheaper than taking your family out for a meal. A couple of joints and whatever trash is on TV is cheaper than going to the cinema. Of course, this leads to a kind of lifestyle which is bad for you both mentally and physically, which in turn makes it rather hard to stop being poor.
Did they normalize in their studies for the fact that many people who might use alcohol or tobacco have had other forces acting on their behavior besides the addiction to the substance, such as the fear of cancer or cirrhosis , the obvious cost of the addiction in cash, social acceptability of indulgence, versus the non-cancer causing (generally, now that CRT's are mostly gone, along with the barrage of X-Rays...) non liver-damaging, socially encouraged, and mostly free option of social media... I kind of doubt it, since it would be awfully hard to quantify any of these things. They're not comparing apples and oranges here, they're comparing apples and whales.
If something so easily available is more addictive than cigarettes that's a really serious problem. Do Facebookers get the shakes if they go a long time without status updates? Would they step outside into freezing cold weather for a Facebook break if they couldn't get a signal indoors?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
As someone who has smoked for almost 20 years and had Facebook since it was only available on a few college campus but now only uses it as a rolodex and ocasional IM service, I assure you, this is just plain STUPID.
This is along the same lines as the claims that tobacco is more addictive than heroin. It's not a fair comparison. The desire for a serious drug is offset by the immediate and serious side effects, so people have a stronger incentive to resist. Indulging in a lesser drug has fewer immediate down sides. Indulging in social media has little to no adverse effects. A much better way to compare addictiveness would be to compare the effects of withdrawal.
Ok, TV I can understand, but how is a packet of cigarettes and bottle of whiskey an alternative to taking your family out to eat?
So are the kids also drinking and smoking?
"Ok kids, instead of going to the Oliver Garden, I got ourselves some cigarettes and whiskey"
"Yay!"
"Daaaad, she got a bigger glass of whiskey than I did!"
"Dear, sit properly and stop playing with your cigarettes... JOHNNY, stop playing with the lighter!"
Then ban Facebook.
Sounds like a fair trade to me.
Also please get rid of these excessive taxes on alcohol and cigarettes. If I'm going to kill myself, at least leave me some money for medical care.
I'm guessing that was the gateway social media. That wife I have I met on there. So one of us is likely a enabler, if not both. To compound matters we have a band, so we're actually judged by the quantity of our "track marks."
With alcohol, you are correct. With cigarettes, you are very, very wrong.
yeah right. even if it was less than 1 cent per post, the government wouldn't know what to do with all the money that would generate.
"Researchers also found that while sleep and sex may be stronger urges than certain drug addictions" Thank you researchers! After 10000+ years of existence we finally know physical necessities (unless one takes up monasticism) could be stronger urges than drugs ! That's extremely fascinating! With enough funding advanced research should finally be able to prove comsuming water and breathing to be even more addictive than sleeping and sex! The FDA should work closely with deep pocket pharmaceuticals to provide humanity with pills to end these ailments. I'm off to ponder this amazing achievement