It’s obvious we live in an always-on, always-connected society, with smartphones quickly replacing regular old mobile phones. The benefits of having instant information and contact come with a price, though, and that’s an addiction to technology.

One Facebook (News - Alert) executive, Stuart Crabb, fears that the constant notifications on our phones will lead to the downfall of physical contact and personal interactions.

“If you put a frog in cold water and slowly turn up the heat, it’ll boil to death — it’s a nice analogy,” said Mr. Crabb, who oversees learning and development at Facebook. People “need to notice the effect that time online has on your performance and relationships,” reported the New York Times.

Even head honchos who dole out this technology stuff are starting to agree that we as a society need a little less screen time and a lot more time interacting with others in real life.

“We’re done with this honeymoon phase and now we’re in this phase that says, ‘Wow, what have we done?’” said Soren Gordhamer, who organizes Wisdom 2.0, an annual event that deals with life balance and technology.

Twitter (News - Alert) co-founder Biz Stone even said earlier this year that using Twitter for too many hours was “unhealthy.”

It’s an unusual statement from someone who co-founded one of the largest social media platforms out there, but it raises an interesting issue: how much time on social media is too much, and are people spending too much time on social media?

The danger of social media is when too much time is spent on it, the excitement can disappear amid the digital noise. When it’s all social media all the time, social media can become a chore rather than a pleasure.

At the Wisdom 2.0 conference in February, amid sessions on yoga and mindfulness, leaders and executives from all the big tech companies (Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Zynga, PayPal (News - Alert), Google, Microsoft and Cisco) “debated whether technology firms had a responsibility to consider their collective power to lure consumers to games or activities that waste time or distract them.”

Other members of the tech community are aware of reports about how people now spend 28 percent of their office time on e-mail and are urging them to be mindful about the “addictive properties” of gadgets.

“It’s this basic cultural recognition that people have a pathological relationship with their devices,” said Kelly McGonigal, a psychologist at Stanford School of Medicine, according to the NYT. “People feel not just addicted, but trapped.”

Given that, then, perhaps it is up to us in technology to teach future generations about the limits of technology gadgets, as much as about their powers. Much like everything else in this world, nothing is terrible in moderation.

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