We created an Offline-Friend Addiction Questionnaire (O-FAQ) are we really addicts?

Liam Satchell (University of Winchester)

Concerns about technology ‘addiction’ has important impacts on public discourse and policy making. Discussions about the potential damaging effects of new technologies is not new, with every new invention being joined with concerns about how they would impact our health and wellbeing – such as with the invention of the book, bicycle, radio, and even the pocket mirror. What should be different now though, is a more robust evidence-based conversation about the impacts on wellbeing. Despite widespread use of the term, ‘social media addiction’ is a surprisingly underdeveloped idea, with the concept, measurement, and medical utility of the term raising questions. Here, using a large team of UK researchers, we satirically imitate the measurement and definition processes in the ‘social media addiction’ literature to argue that we might as well consider 69% of our sample pathologically addicted to spending time with their friends – even offline. Whilst it is absurd to consider time with friends a pathology, this research process highlights how liberal measure ‘validation’ is in some domains and this talk encourages the audience to critique measurement quality more often. (Talk based on Satchell, Fido, et al., 2020).