Journalduweb

The social networking sites are online hangouts; virtual party rooms. And they’re addictive. I’ve struggled with controlling my addiction to these sites for a long time now. But hey, it’s understandable, right? How can I NOT want to know every detail about Ashley, who I went to high school with? Gag me. Not only are these sites turning us all into a bunch of gossip-obsessed drones, but they’re wasting away our time and energy catastrophically. About a year ago, I started allowing myself to be on these sites for only 30 minutes a day. You’d think that 30 minutes a day is more than enough time to catch up with the status updates of old, barely realistic, friends, but it was a drag for me at first. I found myself feeling absent without my Facebook chat readily minimized and on the mark to alert me of any incoming messages. And that’s when I realized that this problem must be affecting all of us.

The social networking fad poses a couple green problems:

1. We are less productive.
   Unless you too are timing yourself on these sites, they eat away at your productivity. And being less productive is never green. You probably don’t realize how much time a day you waste on these sites, but I dare you to time yourself; I dare you to give yourself 30 minutes a day or less on these sites. Once you finish going through withdrawal, you’ll be amazed at how liberated you feel by not always being signed in.
2. We waste energy.
   Many of us spend hours upon hours a day on the computer. But if we’re devoting a chunk of those hours to social networking online, that means we have to devote more hours later to make up for the real work we weren’t attending to. More time on our computers=more energy spent on keeping our computers running.