Is this an addiction?

I was taking my midterm one afternoon and suddenly felt my phone vibrate, it was a twitter update. Risking the professor thinking that I was cheating, I checked it; my friend just wanted to share her horrible day with her twitter family. Call me ridiculous or call me addicted, the anticipation of what that twitter update might have been made me part of the percentage. There really is no surprise there since my generation is so technology oriented. Forget the whole mumbo jumbo about getting the ipad, what good is all this technology without the social networks and applications?

People use to go online mainly to check their emails and maybe glance over headlines on popular then sites such as yahoo or aol. Fast forward to post social networks, I strongly believe people check their Facebook for updates every morning BEFORE they check their emails. I think we are just lucky that people even check their email anymore since they're on Facebook so often, they mainly use Facebook messages. So while people are checking their Facebook for updates, they get a twitter news update and then end up doing some follow up on via google. Users of social network sites are all too comfortable with accessing everything all in one place. I would say it's more of how a user feels being connected and not so much how he or she may feel when he or she gets an update, wouldn't you say? I believe it's not an addiction, it's just staying more connected to each other than people back in the day.