When a friend explained this new thing called Facebook, I couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t text a message to your friends, or share your photos over email, rather than posting them for everyone you knew to see. And I laughed at the idea of Twitter: who’d go for a pared back, rubbish version of Facebook? Needless to say, I’ve now enthusiastically embraced them all. But when I read that Facebook wants us to spend more time on it, the old late-adopter questions went through my mind. Users already spend an average 50 minutes a day on Facebook. Like most people I know, I use it mainly to keep up to date with friends, spy on my exes and show off about my social life. Fun up to a point, but I certainly don’t do that for almost an hour a day. How, then, does Facebook want to eke more time out of us? I spend far more than 50 minutes a day on social media in total: I just spend much more time on Twitter. The average Briton spends 80 minutes a day managing an average of four social networks. So it’s not the total time on social networks that I find it hard to get my head around. I read Twitter when I’m commuting, when I’m watching TV, and when I’m on hold waiting to speak to my bank. It decreases my productivity in some ways: I got very little work done the day Ken Livingstone’s self-implosion was being tracked in real-time. But for me, the benefits far outweigh the downsides: I read news on the go, and access thinking I simply wouldn’t if I were limited to reading one daily newspaper. As I suspect most people do, I fit social media around my life rather than vice versa. Because you can use social media while doing other things – travelling, watching, waiting – I’m sure there’s scope for the total time we spend on it to increase. But there’s got to be a limit, because we all have real-world things that require exclusive attention: reading to your kids, dinner with friends, meetings at work.