I hope my story teaches two things. 1) The process involved in building your own website, from domain name registration to adding sections and revising your design and 2) how the need for perfection and growth can dominate your life, squeezing out your social and personal life.

But the real difference between a techneck and a normal internet user is that a techneck cannot wait for more than one tenth of a second for anything to load. At two tenths of a second they begin to breathe hard, and at three tenths of a second they begin to pull out their hair. (Most technecks are therefore bald).

When you were born you didn’t know how to become helpless, but as you progressed through life and as you experienced a failure after a failure, you learned a new skill, the skill of becoming helpless!!!

Flash forward 5 years: I was engaged to be married, and expecting a baby. Like many pregnant women, the internet was my tool for information, and i soon stumbled apon a pregnancy chatroom. I returned to that chatroom the next day, and found that many of the same people had been coming back for months, even years to mingle with their fellow expectant moms. I started swapping belly photos with them, then baby pictures, and eventually we started hooking up webcams. We exchanged phone numbers. My daughter is turning 3 this year, and I still pop into the virtual room every once and a while.

People most at risk for smartphone addiction usually are people who have anxiety disorders. The internet often distracts them from fears or other things they feel anxiety about.

Ok. for the most part, there is probably nothing wrong with what I’ve described above. That is, unless social media is causing you to neglect your relationships or your job. After all, social media can allow people to more effectively engage on topics with other people they may have never met in real life.

I am an Internet addict. My computer is the first thing turned on in the morning, and the last thing turned off at night. I have spent whole days staring at a computer screen looking for this, checking on that – chatting with so-and-so, playing my latest fancy.