A 19 year old from Paisley, Scotland, is being treated for text and email addiction. According to BBC News Online he was "sending about 700 texts a week and resigned from his job after bosses found out he had sent 8,000 e-mails in one month".
That doesn’t really sound like an email or text related problem to me, more like someone who has some personal issues they need to sort out and who was trying to do that via electronic communication.
This isn’t, of course, the first time technology has been blamed for one thing or another. Last month, the Scotsman Online reported that over-consumption of video games and television makes children "fat, lazy, stupid, ill, sad, unhealthy." Regular cybersoc readers will also remember the study I commented on a few months ago that suggested that "Those distracted by incoming email and phone calls saw a 10-point fall in their IQ – more than twice that found in studies of the impact of smoking marijuana".
Now BBC News Online is reporting on a study suggesting that "E-mail makes office workers lazy" which, in the Sunday papers, was actually printed as something along the lines of "Email makes you fat".
I do hope the same isn’t true for blogging! ;-)