Chapter 3 Social Networking Addictive , Compulsive , Problematic , or Just Another Media Habit ? 1

Social networking services have become a highly popular online activity in recent years with 75% of young adults online, aged 18 to 24, reporting that they have a profile (Lenhart, 2009). Social network sites have become such an obsession with some that they raise concerns about the potential harmful effects of their repeated use, known in the popular press as " Facebook addiction " (Cohen, 2009). For many Internet users, social networking has perhaps indeed become a media habit, defined (after LaRose, 2010; Verplanken & Wood, 2006) as a form of automaticity in media consumption that develops as people repeat media consumption behavior in stable circumstances. How might repeated social networking evolve from a " good " habit that merely indulges a personal media preference into a " bad " habit with potentially harmful life consequences that might rightfully be termed compulsive, problematic , pathological, or addictive? And, is social networking any more or less problematic than other popular Internet activities? Although the extent of Internet pathology by any name, and indeed its very existence, are open to question (Shaffer, Hall, & Vander Bilt, 2000; Widyanto & Griffiths, 2007), the attention of scholars continues to be drawn to the harmful effects of excessive Internet consumption. In a national survey, 6% of U.S. adults said a relationship had suffered as a result of their Internet use Internet usage disorder has been proposed as a new category of mental illness (Block, 2008), including a sub-category of email/text messaging that might subsume social networking. Whether social networking habits are especially problematic or not, they are a distinctive media consumption phenomenon that harkens back to previous studies of television addictions (Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi, 2002). An understanding of Internet habits can extend models of media behavior to