'I am addicted to Crackbook'
Sunday November 11, 2007
By Jo McCarroll [/b]


Clare Short admits she finds Facebook addictive and calls it 'crackbook'.
Clare Short and her friends call Facebook "crackbook", because it's "that addictive". Short, 26, works at a Wellington ICT firm. She keeps tabs on 217 of her friends who are also hooked on Facebook, the latest social networking juggernaut sweeping the globe, with some 42 million users. On average, she checks the site five times at work, on a good day during breaks only.

She has cut down on personal emails, though, from about half of what she sent to 10 per cent.

"My typing got up to nearly 85wpm because I was constantly emailing other similarly bored friends at work and we'd be writing each other novels of emails!"

Now she gets up and walks to colleagues rather than emailing them, and uses the phone, texting and keeps an instant messaging session open on Gmail all day (which allows real-time conversations over the internet).

Email and the internet has made her job much easier, but it's a double-edged sword. "Email is just like fire - a good servant but a bad master!"

Emails, once hailed as the saviour of hectic office life, are now estimated to consume 20 per cent of average working hours. According to US research firm The Radicati Group, American corporate workers sent an average of 37 emails each a day in 2006, with predictions this will rise to 47 by the end of this year.

An informal email survey by the Herald on Sunday found office workers send between five and 80 emails a day, of which anything from 10 per cent to 90 per cent are personal.

The sample was obviously biased towards workplace emailers, but the median of around 50 matched the American figures.

One woman who works in an Auckland law firm admitted to sending 53 emails that morning, only four of which were work-related. Many were about a woman who sat near her.

"I have to email other people around the office with all the stupid things she says and does."

A recent study by the Universities of Glasgow and Paisley found one third of users felt stressed by the volume of email they had to deal with. Many were checking their inbox 30 to 40 times an hour.

The Facebook craze has exploded since, with now more than 52 million active users worldwide. Since January this year an average of 250,000 new users register every day, with active users doubling every six months. The fastest growing demographic is those 25 and older, those likely to already be in the workforce.

Facebook fuels email use, because members are emailed every time one of their registered friends changes their profile (personal page).

The site has become the new Trade Me/Amazon, singled out as this year's scourge of workplace productivity, although surveys suggest news sites are the most popular non-work distractions. Australian internet filtering specialist SurfControl has estimated if one worker spends just an hour a day on Facebook, it could cost their bosses US$6200 ($7933) a year. By that rough formula, Australia's 800,000 businesses could be losing $5 billion a year.