Framing the question of how social media affects individuals as one of addiction overlooks some of its most crucial dimensions - including the all-important question: Can we learn to turn the new way of thinking into a net positive, the way humans learned to deal with the alphabetic culture that Plato warned about, through education and norms? 

Knowing that something is broken, or that there are costs to it we had not thought of when we first started using it, is not enough to tell you what to do or how to fix it […] a better understanding and deeper use of things like Google, Facebook, and Twitter are “essential survival skills” that will last beyond today or the lifespan of those individual companies.

Five hundred years ago, Guttenberg presses did not immediately enable people to overthrow monarchies, drive the Protestant Reformation, and invent science as a collective enterprice. The interval between the technological advance of print and the social revolutions it triggered was required for literacy to spread. Print, a technology that leverages the power of the human mind by making possible mass distribution of written documents, required decades for the intellectual skill of decoding those printed pages to spread through populations. 

As laptop-carrying, smart-phone-using members of the digitally connected infosphere, we need to start by learning a new discipline: the literacy of attention. As citizens and cocreators of the cultures that shape us we need partipatory media skills. As collaborators in the collective intelligence that faces massive problems from global warming to water sharing conflics, we need to learn literacies of cooperation, mass colaboration, and collective action. As dwellers in the network society, we must understand and master the nature along with use of social networks, technical and human - and grasp the way both mediated and face-to-face social practices can increase or drain social capital. And in a world where nobody can trust the authority of any text they find online, the ability to quickly evaluate the validity or bogosity of information is no longe an intellectual nicety. Critical thinking about media practices has become an essential, learnable mental skill.