I have a habit of impulsively joining Facebook groups. Some are for organizations I feel strongly about, such as Support the Monks' Protest In Burma. But my list also includes memberships in such elite online fraternities as Pugs Not Drugs! and fan clubs devoted to the defunct Baltimore garage band Dr. Tasty and former Washington Wizards forward Oleksiy Pecherov, whose major claim to fame is that he vaguely resembles the Little Stewie character from the animated TV show The Family Guy.
But of all the Facebook groups to which I belong, perhaps the oddest is the Facebook Addiction Disorder group, which is devoted to the premise that, for some of us, social media has become the new monkey on our backs. Okay, so there's an inescapable Larry David-esque irony bordering on parody of self-admitted Facebook addicts seeking control over their compulsion by joining a Facebook group, and many of the other members are either jokers or graduate students trying to write papers on the subject. Even so, it got me wondering. I'm not as addicted as, say, the alleged Mafia don who was apprehended by Italian police a few months ago after he kept posting to Facebook while on the lam. But could it be that my habit of checking Facebook a dozen times a day and posting countless replies to friends' status posts, pictures of my basset hound-pit bull Madge, and links to vintage music videos on YouTube is turning from a source of amusement into a problem? Maybe I should Tweet to my followers about this and ask their opinion. In the meantime, here's a CNN story about Facebook addiction.
On the other hand, before I seek what Madison Avenue creative-type-turned-blogger Sarah Browne calls "social media detox," I could view my near-continuous use of social media as evidence that I'm one of my generation's trend setters. In a post a while back on Generation Jones--those of us born in the second half of the baby boom between 1954 and 1965--I noted that Jonesers are like Gen-Xers in terms of the extent to which we've immersed ourselves in Web 3.0 social media. According to this study of user profiles on the most popular social media sites, Jonesers amount to 19 percent of total users--nearly twice the number of older boomers in the mix.
Jonesers tend to like some social media modes more than others. Lori Bitter, president of the boomer-oriented marketing research firm Continuum Crew, writes in this recent blog post about her firm's study of generational use of social networking. CC found, for example, that Jonesers are only slightly more likely (43 percent vs. 39 percent) to use Facebook than older boomers, but nearly twice as likely (15 percent vs. 8 percent) to go for the quick, pithy gratification of Twitter.
The more striking contrast is the extent to which many of us younger boomers have integrated social media into our daily lives. According to this study by market research firm Rapleaf, Jonesers are about three times as likely to have friended 100 or more users on social networks as older boomers. Of the 14 percent of all boomers are heavy users of social media--"social media mavens," in marketing parlance, who average 20 contacts a day with online friends--Continuum Crew found that a sizable majority of 62 percent are Jonesers.
Bitter's group describes those of us in that category as "connected, exploring and expanding networks daily." We're not just amassing mountains of friends to look cool, researchers say. Instead, we're having frequent interactions with family members, political organizations, hobby or interest groups, religious organizations, social groups, neighbors, co-workers, former co-workers and business contacts. We're giving and seeking advice, exchanging opinions, organizing activities. And of course, we make and seek recommendations about what products to buy, something which increasingly interests marketers.
So the upshot is that I'm not addicted. I'm a maven. I really like that word, especially since it sounds a little like one of those multi-limbed, armor-clad freakoid World of Warcraft characters. But we'll save boomer online gaming for another day.