Are You Addicted to Facebook? Shaun White interviews Katina Michael

Shaun White interviews Katina Michael taking a look at whether users are connected or disconnected from real life.

By the time you finish this intro, more than a 250,000 people will update their Facebook status. A further 130,000 will upload a photo. Every day, Facebook users will spend more than 20 minutes on the social media platform. Sunrise reporter Shaun White is one of them. Most of us love Facebook, but it's become more than a phenomenon, I spent one hour. Seven hours a week. 28 hours. Of course, out of work time. 12 days a year of Facebook. Most of us have it but it has become more of an. but it's become more than a phenomenon, it can be an addiction. So where do you draw line, that friend being Facebook itself? People present a varnished view of themselves online, not a tarnished view. It is all about presenting the best part of yourself. 1.7 billion, that's how many of users log into Facebook each month, Sharing our lives through updates, posts and photo uploads. When a notification comes up I go on it, so it is like, most of my day. There's no denying Facebook helps people connect with love ones, including video chats with family and friends on the other side of the world, but are we checking-in online more then we are checking-in on real-life? We're looking around at what are other people doing. We are benchmarking ourselves against others, when the compulsion hits us, we cannot stop. Doctor Katina Michaels from the University of Wollongong is well researched on the dangers of a life dominated by friend requests, especially if you are somebody vulnerable to online validation. In the end our relationships in the real world start to fail, and there is a dysfunction, so it's not really social networking, it is social dysfunction. The Facebook Addiction Scale created in the University of Bergen in Norway in 2011 has six questions. It's a great indicator of how much time you spend Facebooking. Some of them have to do with, are you escpaing to Facebook to hide those personal problems? Are your studies and your workplace failing as a result of your increase of Facebook? Another great method is to log into your smart phone settings and check the battery use for the Facebook app, then converted to time, using the little clock icon. Altogether, about an hour. A day? So that's, what, seven hours a week? So that's 28 hours a month. Once an hour. You know what I mean? I just go for a stroll every hour. One status you might unlike is a psychological phenomenon called Phantom Vibration Syndrome. Where you think you felt your phone go but it actually didn't. If you decide it is time to pull back, here are some key tips. Consider deleting your account. So you don't have a Facebook account at all? Turn off your smart phone and tablet notifications. Monitor your usage. Switch off once a week. Limit daily time or, like this woman, skip the day altogether. How often? In the nighttime only. I loved her. She knows all about me. From phantom vibration syndrome. I do. I get that sometimes. When you think it is vibrating in your handbag and it is not. Is it just your phone? Stop laughing, crew.