Social Media?

I was reading  a report on social media use which I found quite interesting, if not a little scary:

 

Specifically, among American social network users: (As at 2013)

• 18-34-year-olds report spending 3.8 hours a day;
• 35-49-year-olds report spending 3 hours per day; and
• 50-64-year-olds report spending 2.4 hours per day.
• In terms of the gender difference, female social networkers spend almost 40% more time daily with social media sites than men (3.6 hours vs. 2.6 hours), a finding consistent with earlier research from MyLife and from Burst Media showing women to be more active than men on social media.
• Interestingly internationally there are a lot of countries that have much higher use of social networks than the United States.

I also found it interesting that the average American only gets 6.8 hours sleep. (This is a significant drop from 7.9 hours in 1942.) The reason I was interested in that was to see how much of their waking hours were occupied by social media. So the average American is a awake 17.2 hours. So at the lower levels of use they are exchanging around 15-20% of their awake time to this phenomena in very rough terms.

Interestingly I don't consider myself  a particularly heavy social media user. I did start thinking how much of my life is this phenomena occupying, because of responding to the "Oh that looks a bit interesting  I will go and have a look.'' attention getter.

I decided to ask myself a few questions:

Is my life any better for this activity?   The  answer; probably not. 

Do I feel any better socially connected than before? The  answer; A little through Facebook. But there is really no  major depth. Anything that is really meaningful  still happens face to face.

Do I waste time? The  answer; yes especially on Trade Me (A New Zealand online auction site like E-Bay)

If I am honest do I have a problem with it at present? The  answer; probably not but I need to be aware and monitor my use.

I need to live intentionally in this area and continue to monitor where I sit. Because at the moment I don't have time to access much. However when I do get time I tend to use more time than I need to.

 I do however get benefits, after all I am still talking to you on social media

How about how you?

How do you go with the questions?

Until next week, Paul