social networking vs coffee/sweets

Which would you rather give up? Apparently a survey commissioned by Nokia came
up with the (perhaps not so surprising) result that people would rather go without
coffee and sweets than give up their mobile phone for two weeks. Blasphemy, if you ask me. More seriously, isn't it a sign of times when a survey on things-you-cannot-live-without pits coffee/sweets against pointless banter? Social networking has obviously been the buzz word over the past couple of years. There are any number of technovangelists who can talk about its benefits and get incredible attention from the mainstream media. When Greenpeace unfurled a protest banner over Mount Rushmore and broadcast it over youtube, we all heard about it. And who could ignore the insane amount of news coverage that twitter gets. Where are the horror stories? Who is responsible for studying the pros and cons of social networking? Shouldn't the social networking companies play a greater role here? After all, cigarette companies are required to display a big fat warning on all their products. Isn't social networking equally, if not more, addictive and more easily available to millions?

My skepticism builds upon the simple fact that we (including me) are spending an insane amount of our time online (one-way, two-way, n-way communications mostly).
While the Internet and its associated applications do satisfy an innate human need to communicate, I doubt if we need to be communicating all the time. I suspect (and hope) that what we are observing today is an anomaly in human history much like the bowling fad of the 50s. End of the rant.