Addiction! The word had negative social connotations. If you
tell the average person that YOU ARE AN ADDICT, he or she will protest
vehemently and do his/her best to make you feel that you have indulged in the
character assassination of the worst kind. Yet it is true! Each one of you who
is reading this is an addict. So am I. So are my wife and my kids. My parents,
thankfully, are spared of this malady. Yes, we are all internet addicts! And
then there are further sub-types of this addiction. Facebook addiction, Twitter
addiction, Blog addiction, Youtube addiction; the list is endless. And then
some of us are addicted to salacious photographs of Poonam Pandey and Sunny
Leon, but that is understandable, is it not!
The internet service interrupted for a few hours sends us
all into a tizzy. We repeatedly check our modems, the telephone line and the
sundry paraphernalia associated with out laptops. We yearn for our daily fix of
internet browsing, become anxious, irritable, apprehensive and show the classic
withdrawal symptoms. If the broadband is still out we’ll use our phones or
consider visiting the neighboring cybercafé; in fact anything to get our daily
fix of social networks. We almost behave
like our lives and livelihoods are dependent on the likes and comment our inane
status updates or useless photographs we paste on Twitter, Face book and other
sundry networks attract.
Are we all mentally sick? Do we seriously need to turn
towards THE REAL WORLD and GET A LIFE? Food for thought! *
*Then there is mobile addiction and TV addiction, but we’ll
talk about them some other day. Right now, I need to check how many like and
comments my last STATUS UPDATE has
garnered.
