If Social Media Sites Were Drugs, These Are the Drugs They Would Be

WIRED

Earlier today Pew released a survey that found 23 percent of adults in the United States used Twitter in 2014.

That’s up from 18 percent in 2013, but a far cry from the 71 percent who used Facebook. Indeed, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram all grab higher shares of the American adult crowd.

Ben Dreyfuss

Ben Dreyfuss is the Engagement Editor and Mother Jones Magazine, and—full disclosure—is the brother of WIRED Opinion editor Emily Dreyfuss, which is the only reason he agreed to let her publish this.

For the apparently vanishingly tiny percentage of Americans who tweet dozens of times a day—the overwhelming majority of Twitter users basically never tweet—this seems nuts. Twitter is intensely addictive! How do only a handful of people use it? How do 300 million Americans go a whole day, week, month, life without checking Twitter incessantly? Are they monks? Ascetics? How do they stay clean and sober?

The answer, of course, says more about Twitter’s high barrier to entry than it does the ultimate addictiveness, but just like with drugs, for those of us born with the tendency to overuse, Twitter is irresistible.

Anyway, I took this train of thought naturally to Twitter to riff on social networks and drugs. Do these tweets make perfect sense? Maybe not! But hey, it’s social media! It’s fun and jazzy and casual and not everything makes sense but there is still some essential truth to it! You dig?

Do you agree? Sound off with your own analogies in the comments if you think you can do better.