Are You Addicted to the Online World of Facebook or Twitter?

Twitter has become a mandated activity for internet users. If you don't Twit or Tweet or blow bird whistles, then you cannot exist online. That may sound like hyperbole to the "untwittered", but it's the gospel according to Twitter.

And like all good cult activities, the use of Twitter to tweet your life and make all your dreams come true, depends upon how swiftly you succumb to the brainwashing jargon and rituals of tweeting, twittering, and retweeting. It took four years for this writer to hit bottom and find herself with finger tips raw from the keyboard and her eyesight failing from hours spent in mindless pursuit of the perfect Tweet. It's there, somewhere in her brain.

This writer enjoyed her foray into blogging at Wordpress four years ago, and like all addictive patterns, one tempting encounter with the keyboard led to another - a seemingly harmless trip to Facebook, where friendly folk just came out of the woodwork to befriend her. She joined and thus, her doom was set.

Sure, the comment section on Facebook limited her somewhat, but it was easy to just add another window to smoothly transition her 200 word comment on the vegetable interests of a Farmville friend, who wanted her to come and plow his field. (The comment she offered him involved suggestions for psychiatric treatment).

On Facebook she could easily "ignore" the hundreds of "invitations" to start farming on Farmville, building a group of friends in Yoville, or putting out a contract hit in Mafia Wars. A social life on Facebook lined up perfectly with an intellectual one on Wordpress, where deep thoughts and serious topics could be blogged about.

After dipping the brain cells into heavy hitting intellectual forays, a trip to Facebook where a quiz on what Little House on the Prairie character she was, seemed like a nice change of pace. Adopt a new pet from Pet Society, plant a Bonsai tree in her Green Patch and place a few bets in Texas Hold-em. She could even kick back and sip a virtual martini with the gang at Joe's Cafe with no hangover the next morning.

A matrix of "friends" soon grew at often alarming rates as an old old high school sweetheart hunted her down along with friends of friends of friends. Who knew that 500 friends could materialize so quickly. Facebook befriending made up for those cold lonely heartless days of high school when her popularity was based on her reputation as an intellectual slut.

As this writer's online presence grew, she began to hear about "branding" and how important it was to establish a clear brand, tying all your various online personas into one distinctly witty clever presentable package that would tell the world who you were and what you could do. Hmm...looking around the domains of Word Press and the world of Facebook, this writer realized she looked a bit schizophrenic.

How could she care about starving children in Africa, the political situation in Washington, the debate over healthcare reform and still accept pet lizards from people she had never met and wasn't for sure she would ever recognize if she did. Suddenly it all seemed a bit juvenile.

Soon her growing confusion about her brand retreated as a new world began to beckon, to demand that she come check out the buzz - Twitter. Off she went, fingers clicking, and found a bizarre landscape, where unintelligible phrases were thrown out in 140 characters or less and then reshaped and sent out to another twitterer who reshaped them and sent the words on and on into an endless void and who knew where it all might end. The matrix was alive and working on Twitter!

Whereas the "friends of Facebook" at least appeared to have some contact with the writer, the "follower's of Twitter" made them look like the yokels they really were. The strangers on Twitter had odd job titles like Personal Transformative Relationship builder or Pop Media Consultant and Guru. Worst of all they didn't need permission to "follow", they just did! Stalking her words, and waiting for that perfect gem of wisdom to come rolling from her fingers onto their screen.

The pressure to perform was too much, words began to bombard the writer, and she retreated swiftly to her familiar Facebook, where sanity ruled. Kicking back with a "strawberry margarita", she contemplated her "brand" and engaged in a quick game of Lexulous, beating her previous score. Life was back to normal. She was saved from the strange land of shapeshifting tweeters.

And yet, she had joined..and in her email box, little tweets followers kept coming..begging her to follow them too, a zillion Pied Pipers piping their tunes of perfection and prosperity. Facebook "friends" and virtual "friends" and even her hairdresser told her to come Twitter with them.

Each time, the pain of Twittering came back and she retreated in a foggy haze of doubt and despair, wondering what was wrong with her, that she couldn't find enjoyment in Twitter. She finally decided it was her age. Alas, the future had come and she was left behind with an old seldom used My Space page, 20 yahoogroups that she rarely checked, a stale Word Press blog that no one ever read anymore, and a boring, but safe Facebook page where at least 500 friends still cared about her endless ramblings and writings.

Then the word began to spread about a "Tweet Deck"...and a "Hoot Suite". Apparently these "birdhouses" enabled a person to tweet with perfection, to find a home in the land of Twitter. This writer journeyed to Twitterland one lazy fall afternoon, and "purchased" a Tweet Deck, complete with neat rows of order amongst the chaos. And suddenly, she saw the light.

The Light of Twitter shone all around her and she found herself drinking deeply at the keyboard, following with abandon strange people from strange lands, tweeting their tweets, singing their songs and the music was sweet, tempting, beguiling.

The search for internet networking perfection was complete; or had it just begun as she began her journey to create that perfect Tweet.

Additional Resources

This writer Tweets mindless gibberish at her Twitter profile, comments on her delightful friends at Facebook, and occasionally is still able to find an intelligent thought at Associated Content or Examiner and when the philosophical mood strikes she retreats to her rambling rose Wordpress blog.

If you think you might be addicted to Facebook or Twitter

If you are concerned about the amount of time you spend on Facebook, you might consider checking out
FAD or Facebook Addiction Disorder

Or if you feel your Twitter use might be a bit obsessive, look at the 25 warning signs for Twitter addiction here.