Did twitter& facebook change my life?

I am addicted to twitter, facebook, igoogle & blog-world.
I am very busy with my laptop, and I don’t know how all of this can ever stop.
I need to check Twitter on a very regular basis (5 times a day?), if I post something then I need to see if it is retweeted, commented or just ignored. I need to read other peoples post, links, and blogs, and see their funny & sometimes bizarre pictures. I have 250 followers (depending on the days). A new follower can generate happiness (yeah an Australian person is reading my posts!) or disappointed (oh, another porn sites that automatically generates followers). The amazing part of twitter must be it’s real-time aspect. One of my first wow experiences was a tweet about an earthquake in Lebanon that happened few minutes before the tweet was created. I thought that was crazy and so vivid. Like the time people were tweeting live from Bombay during the attacks. This could not have existed without twitter.

But did this actually change my life?

My virtual world has also expanded tremendously the last 2 months after I acquired a farm (Farmville), an aquarium (fish world) and a café (café world) through facebook. They require hard work on a daily basis,& I must visit often to harvest, ploy, send gifts, receive gifts, buy fish eggs, sell fish eggs, steal fish, clean aquarium, cook meals, serve meals, decorate café, expand café. If I don’t to all of that every day, my fish will die, my crops will wilt, and my food will rot. Also I will not earn enough coins to buy more seeds, more fish, and cook more meals. And on top of that I will never ever reach the same levels as my neighbours, who by the way are my true friends, but happen to be neighbours in our virtual world. I am therefore more stressed than before and soon will need a virtual massage and a virtual drink to calm down.

Is this adding anything positive to my life?

On a social level, Facebook is making me connect with friends and family, near and far, and it might have changed my life a bit by adding a closer connection to people that I would normally only see and talk to once a year or less. It makes them closer to me in a sense. They react in a warm and funny way to my links, to my pictures; to my recipe (yes I even founded a café on facebook where members (again 200- something) can find my favourite recipes.

The positive aspects of Twitter and facebook exist, no doubt about that.
BUT, it makes me addicted and can sometimes enhance loneliness because interaction with virtual world is safer that the REAL world who is only few cm away from the screen. You can shut down the whole thing when you are tired or bored and it will be there when you come back and turn it on again.

Time flies when I am sitting surfing, twittering, facebooking, reading, blogging.. all of it only with a click.. But time is also stolen from me, as I tend to forget my dreams, my goals, and what I want from my real life. My focus is shifted to the virtual world and I need to refocus on stuff outside this laptop. My time-span is also disrupted because everything changes with a click, and following all the news, in real-time is almost as difficult as zapping between 3 news channels, 5 movie channels and 2 music channels at once. Impossible!

I need to find a middle ground with more reality and less “virtuality”, with more selective focus and less zapping..
If someone has found this balance, please share! I will definitely retweet it!!!

Happy New Year everyone, where ever you are…