“Writer, editor, and Web professional” (who isn’t a Web professional these days?) Larry Carlat has a New York Times Magazine piece about how Twitter destroyed his life:

It started June 25, 2008: “Testing, testing. Is this thing on?” My first tweet. I began by trying to make a few friends laugh. I had no idea how quickly tweeting would consume me. Before long I was posting 20 to 30 times a day, seven days a week. Some of my posts were funny, some sad, some vaguely existential — “Living happily ever after is killing me” — some flirty, some filthy. I posted daily for three years with only one exception — the day my father-in-law died. Eventually, I attracted about 25,000 followers. Not bad for a noncelebrity.

Soon my entire life revolved around tweeting. I stopped reading, rarely listened to music or watched TV. When I was out with friends, I would duck into the bathroom with my iPhone. I tweeted while driving, between sets of tennis, even at the movies. (“I love holding your hand in the dark.”) When I wasn’t on Twitter, I would compose faux aphorisms that I might use later. I began to talk that way too. I sounded like a cross between a Barbara Kruger installation and a fortune cookie. I posted every hour on the hour, day and night, using a Web site that enabled me to tweet while asleep.

It was an obsession. And like most obsessions, no good came of it.

It’s a frank piece, and I’m sure there are plenty of readers who will see a bit of themselves in it– not that they’d go that far, but will recognize the albeit extreme version of the impulse that cost Carlat his job and personal life. As someone who spent a frightening amount of his adolescence (and hell, college years) in video arcades, I know first-hand how attractive these kinds of things can be.

It’s also notable that aside from descibing it once as a “habit,” Carlat doesn’t really invoke the language of addiction to describe his Tweeting; obsessions are not quite the same thing as addictions, though neither is good. This fits in with something I’m starting to see in my interviews with people who take digital Sabbaths: the people who get the most out of behavioral changes aimed at spending less time with potentially distracting activities are the people who talk in terms of distracting themselves with the activities, not in terms of being addicted to them.

Framing the problem this way empowers people to change; thinking of it in exclusively in terms of “the Internet has taken over part of my OS” or “my brain is addicted to the dopamine squirt of my new message alert” are implicitly arguing that they can’t change.

At the same time, I finished the piece a little skeptical. Sure, I’m willing to believe that Twitter made things worse, but I couldn’t help suspecting that the author had problems that would have eventually surfaced wth or without social media. We love sensational, scary articles about people who drop dead after 48 hours of video games, or starve their pets while playing with virtual ones, but I have a hard time with the “Reefer Madness” theory of digital addiction– that the device is responsible for an unhappy life, rather than our poor use of it reflecting a deeper unhappiness.

This was really brought home to me in some interviews I did recently with Buddhist monks who run Web sites, have YouTube channels, talk about meditation on Facebook, etc. When I asked them what they do to keep from being distracted by the Web, they all rejected my premise and turned the question around. Why, they asked me, do you think distraction comes from technology? “Distractions exist with or without PCs,” one monk told me. Another said that technologies are “much easier to handle than distractions coming from inside the mind itself.” One put it this way: “How much contentment do distractions yield? If I sit here mindfully, isn’t that more serene than watching cats barking on YouTube? Of course it is.”

In this perspective, technology addiction or obsession is a symptom, not a cause. And I’m starting to come around to the idea that there’s really something to it.