How to Control Internet and Social Network Addiction? Part 2: The Analysis

January 2, 2018

The Internet is a big part of your daily lifestyle. Isn’t it? But ever thought about how much time it is snatching away from your daily routine?

Are you eager to check your mobile phone every few minutes? Ever thought about the reason why do you feel this urges?

Maybe you opened the phone to check whether you got any missed calls, but ended up opening facebook and browsing for hours.

Say its exam time and you have promised yourself no phone for the next 6 hours, but still, you are peeking into social networks now and then. Yes, you know it is wasting your time, and it’s better if you invest them in studying or work, but still, you enjoy being on the phone.

Why can’t you control yourself?

In this series of Internet and Social Network Addiction, we are trying to analyze our smartphone habits so that we can change them for our betterment. Welcome to Part 2: The Analysis. Here, we will take a closer look at our internet addictions, and analyze them.

In the last part, we discussed that all our addictions lie in our mind. There are three types of mind, and we can only control one of them. It is a pretty impressive read, where you will know about your Conscious, Sub-Conscious, and Unconscious Mind and what do they work. Check that out.

So, let’s begin, shall we?

What are our Internet Addictions:

Before we try to regulate our addictions, let’s try to list out the things that contribute to our internet addictions.

Here are the things we mostly like to do with our smartphones, that eats away our time.

Social Networking, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.
Instant Messaging such as Whatsapp, Hike, Telegram, etc.
Checking Emails.
Searching for apps, games, movies, books and anything else.
Browsing and streaming music.
Staying active in forums and communities like Reddit.
Browsing E-Commerce.
Playing Games (most of the games you play are online-based, even one game counts)
Watching Videos from your favorite channels on YouTube.
Watching Movies, TV Series or Web Series.
Watching P**nography.

Apart from this, when you are not using your phone, you still feel the urge to check your phone due to the following primary reasons:

Notifications
Without any substantial reason: You just need to get updates. (I was a victim of this, so I know how this feels like, every few minutes you just pick up your phone, unlock it and open some apps).

It’s funny that some people are addicted to watching TV, even when everything telecasted there follows a strict schedule, and you get a remote on top of that to switch it off. The Internet has no remotes; its fundamental principle is your content at your time. So, switching away from it isn’t going to be easy.

comScore Mobile App Report:

Now, let’s talk about some survey results. The Advertising platform comScore did a thorough survey of some USA Consumers and got some impressive results.

Here’s the amount of time spent by users on different mediums: Desktop, Smartphone (Web and App), and Tablet (Web and App). And Smartphone Apps dominates the chart by a 50% share.

Time spent on Mobile Apps are much more than Mobile Web. In fact, Apps contribute as much as 87%. Wow!

Now things will start to become more interesting as the survey goes deeper into the usage behaviors. Don’t get surprised!

Next up, check out this report, where three conditions were given, and it was checked how many of them agree to the conditions.

The first condition was: My Smartphone Will be Useless to me without apps.

The second condition was: The moment I get bored, I feel an urge to pull out my smartphone and open an app.

The third condition was: When I see a notification from one of my apps, I have to check it immediately.

Now, check out the responses below.

Well, let’s come to the app usage statistics. What are the top 10 apps ruling the smartphones this year? Check them out here.

The exciting thing about the list is that 5 of them is owned by Google and 3 of them owned by Facebook alone. Only Snapchat and Pandora were the other two companies that could enter the top 10 list. Surprise. Surprise.

Finding your apps on this list where you spend most of your time?

Let’s spice it up further. These were the responses when 18-34-year-old people were asked about the apps they can’t live without. Check that out.

Now, finally, let’s look at the time spent by average users on different content categories.

Social Networking, Music, Multimedia, Messengers, and Games, etc. Entertainment and Communication categories contribute as much as 65% of the time spent.

Mediakix did a survey of the average amount of time people usually spend on social networking per day on average and concluded this.

Source: Mediakix

YouTube constitutes 40 minutes, and Facebook takes away 35 minutes. The surprising thing is Twitter has a just 1-minute share. Well!

So, here we stand! We have so many things to achieve in our real life, but instead, we choose to indulge ourselves inside the internet.

Know your Internet Usage Habits:

Okay, now let’s find out what your smartphone usage pattern is. Don’t worry, it is not hard, and you can do it yourself.

Nowadays there are a lot of apps available which will do the job for you. Just install and forget. It will analyze your mobile usage pattern and give you a daily, weekly, or monthly report.

Well, I did go through a lot of apps that does the job and selected the best two apps. I am using them myself too. Remember one thing; these apps need your usage access to calculate how much time you are spending on your phone.

Antisocial Phone Addiction: One unique thing about this app is that it compares your usage pattern to other users across the world so you can know where you stand. It asks for your Gender and your age group before allowing you to enter the app. On the homepage, it will show you a graphical representation of your mobile phone usage. You can see the no of times you unlocked your device and the no of minutes you spent on social media (compared to other users).

Over the days, weeks, and months you will get a complete statistical data about your digital distraction.

RealizD: With a Rating of 4.5 Stars, this app efficiently scans how much you use your device. It actively tracks your usage pattern based on how many times you unlocked your device. How many minutes you kept it locked before opening your phone, and what is your most extended turn off interval. It should give you a pretty good idea of how much you are using (and misusing) your smartphone.

Additionally, it also tracks the number of minutes you have used an app actively. You can also take a break by setting a preset time you want to keep yourself away from your phone.

So, do your research, and you will find out a lot more about your internet usage patterns. These results might often surprise you. But don’t worry, we will work on them together to solve it.

Well, that’s all for this part of the series. All I wanted to write here is an analysis of our Mobile and Internet Addictions. And I am sure you are now aware of your digital distractions.

In the next and final part of this Internet and Social Network Addiction series, I will be discussing on Time Management. How can you organize yourself and make the best use of your time? And I won’t be confining myself to just switching off your Internet Addictions; I will be discussing how to maintain productivity throughout.

Thank you for reading this article. If you have any further queries, you can hit me in the comments section below. I will be happy to help you out. And don’t forget to share this post with your friends. See you around.

What to Read Next?

If you missed our previous part of the series, you might want to read that: How to Control Internet and Social Network Addiction? Part 1: The Psychology

If you have troubles with Spoken English, you can check out my article on the Best Ways to Develop and Increase English Vocabulary Skills

Finally, you might want to check out the Top Keyboard Apps for Android 2018: Compared & Reviewed

Thank You. 🙂

SaveSavedRemoved 0

Nirmal Sarkar

Nirmal Sarkar is a Biotechnologist from the city of Joy, Kolkata. He is the founder of this blog and covers a wide range of topics from Gadgets to Software to Latest Offers. You can get in touch with him via nirmal@hitricks.com