Virtual Crack. Yummy.
April 1st, 2008 | by Brad King |I’ve been having a conversation with a newly-minted friend from Boston, Amanda Gravel, about addiction and social media. We spend an inordinate amount of time in the blogo- and social media-spheres.
There’s been quite a bit of talk about Internet addiction in the last week or so, spurred on by this editorial.
I have to say, I’ve always been skeptical of such claims by people going back to my days at Wired News. Every so often, someone would claim that games, or the Web, or mobile devices were taking up more and more time. And those who found themselves suddenly disconnected showed signs similar to drug addicts going through withdrawal.
It drove me crazy. But maybe that’s the point.
The more connected I become, the more I rely on those connections to get me through my daily life, which at times is a train wreck of NASCAR proportions.
I find myself increasingly turning to those virtual friends — the Twitter-verse, the IM sphere, the blog, the texters — for comfort, companionship and comradery. In many cases, I’ve turned away from in real life encounters (IRL for those in the know) so that I could continue to spend time with my virtual friends, many of whom I’ve never — and may never — meet.
This is the world which many of us live in, the beginnings of the metaverse, the always-on, plugged-in, jacked-in universe where reality and virtuality are indistinguishable.
Of course, this doesn’t explicitly have anything to do with news and journalism; however, it does. This is the new world, the one that a large percentage of the population is moving towards. It will never quite be 100 percent, which is the disconnect. Those two worlds are increasingly going to be isolated from each other, at least in some manner or form.
