Irma Dinia, not her real name, considers herself a social media addict. Every morning upon waking up, she checks her Twitter timeline and Facebook newsfeed from bed, just to see if there is any mention of her name. She does the same before going to bed at night. “I am really annoyed with that, but I can’t stop myself from doing the same thing again and again. I just feel like I need to,” Irma, a 31-year-old private employee in Central Jakarta, spoke of her dilemma.
She said she would feel a rush of excitement whenever people retweeted her, or when her status on Facebook invited a string of comments. Conversely, a muted reaction to her posts would leave her feeling down. “That’s a thing I’m ashamed to admit, but that is how I feel,” Irma said. Icha, a 20-year-old student at the Bandung State Polytechnic (Polban), similarly shared her problematic addiction with social media sites. “I keep opening Twitter although there is no mentioning. That’s annoying but I can’t stop.
The timeline is often boring, but I just keep checking it,” Icha told the Jakarta Globe in a phone interview from Bandung. “I used to hurt my fingers just to reply to all those mentionings, but I kept replying to them,” she added. Icha said the obsession had been with her since she started using a BlackBerry early last year. “Whenever I ran out of my phone credit, I would check Twitter via my mom’s or dad’s cellphones,” she said. Icha said in recent months her addiction to Twitter had become less intense, but only because her friends had migrated to the happening chat services WhatsApp and LINE.
“And I’ve started delaying recharging my phone credits because whenever I have them, I am tempted to do all those [social media activities].” Although there is no study or official report yet about social media addiction in Indonesia, the potential is certainly there, with Indonesians ranking among the top users of Facebook and Twitter. The latest data from checkfacebook.com shows Indonesia’s 47 million users sit fourth in terms of the number of Facebook users worldwide, after the United States, Brazil and India. France-based social media monitor Semiocast last year named Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, as the world’s most active Twitter city, taking first place among a top five that included Tokyo, London, the British city of Manchester and New York.
Bandung, Indonesia’s third largest city, came in sixth place. Some Twitter-related phenomena also owe their origins to Indonesia. There are those “selebtwit,” or Twitter celebrities, namely people who are not public figures but manage to gain a significant following and become celebrities of a sort; “kultwit,” an Indonesian acronym for Twitter lectures, in which users tweet continuously for hours about certain issues; and Twitter wars, most prominently waged when Twitter celebrities attack each other in 140-character jabs.
A psychology professor from the University of Indonesia (UI), Hamdi Muluk, said on Thursday that social media addiction could be considered a pathological disorder requiring therapy. “It is not a physical addiction as is the case with cigarettes or alcohol, but it can be classified as a psychological addiction. The parameter is if it is excessive or not,” said Hamdi, who heads the doctorate program at UI’s School of Psychology. “If the time they use for social media exceeds normality and disrupts their daily activities — distracting them from work, making them forget to eat, reducing their sleeping hours and causing them to feel restless and anxious if they don’t [get their regular exposure to social media] — then it is pathological,” he explained.
Hamdi said more than four hours of daily engagement with social media could be classified as a pathological addiction. He added that people with low self-esteem, individuals struggling with their real social lives or those with obsessive tendencies or craving attention were especially prone to social media addiction. “And they’re usually not aware that they’re having a problem; it is people around them who will usually first take notice,” Hamdi said. A recent report by Reuters TV highlights social media addiction as a newly recognized psychological problem.
“Likes” and retweets give users a burst of the addictive neurotransmitter dopamine, but a lack of endorsements can provoke jealousy and anxiety. And it’s a lot more common than people might think, although some aren’t willing to admit it. Reuters TV quoted consultant psychiatrist Richard Graham from NHS Tavistock and Portman Clinic in London, who said he treated around 100 social media addicts a year at the clinic, with the patients’ ages ranging from 10 to 35. A study last year by the University of Chicago, which was presented in the US city of San Diego on Jan. 27 at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, found that social media addiction could actually be more problematic than cigarettes or alcohol.
The study, called the Everyday Temptation Study, examined and compared various desires people experience in everyday life, including a look at basic needs such as food, sleep and sex, and “modern cravings” such as smartphones and social media. “Social media stood out as a desire that is relatively hard to control in comparison,” Wilhelm Hofmann, associate professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and a co-author of the study, said in an e-mail to the Jakarta Globe. More than 40 percent of 205 adults from the city of Würzburg in Germany who were subjects of the study failed to resist “media desires,” including surfing the web, checking e-mails and especially social networking.
The percentage was higher than of those who failed to resist other desires, such as for cigarettes, alcohol and sex. The study, which did not differentiate between men and women, suggests social media’s addictive nature is perhaps because of the constant availability of media. “For sure, the long-term and health consequences of media over-consumption may be less harmful than those of other behaviors we compared it to, such as smoking or alcohol abuse,” a brief summary of the study’s findings reads. “At the minimum, however, these activities may consume considerable portions of people’s time and distract attention from other goals and activities,” it adds.
Additional reporting by Abdul Qowi Bastian.
source : the jakarta globe
Additional reporting by Abdul Qowi Bastian.
source : the jakarta globe
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