Are You Facebook Obsessed?

By Amanda Pendolino on December 22nd, 2009

Last night, some friends and I dined at Ketchup on the Sunset Strip, sampling three kinds of french fries and five varieties of ketchup as our appetizer. As we dunked and muched, one of my friends whipped out her phone, excitedly announcing that she was going to update her Facebook status and tell everyone about our culinary adventure.

We’ve all done it – visited a new place or saw an interesting person or thought of a hilarious anecdote that we just had to share with seven hundred of our closest friends, relatives, coworkers and acquaintances. But when does it become too much? At what point does social networking start to interfere with the real lives we’re living in the physical world? And at the other end of our phones, how many people are sitting like zombies in front of the computer screen, clicking refresh?

According to the New York Times, many teenagers are deactivating their Facebook accounts or severely limiting their usage so that they can focus on their schoolwork and college applications. I enjoy social networking, and I think there are some great benefits to Facebook, but knowing our tendencies and setting limits makes a lot of sense. Sometimes I think about people like Jane Austen, who completed Pride and Prejudice before she turned 21. If we didn’t have Twitter and Facebook, what would we do with that extra time? Could we accomplish more?