Sherry Turkle, a professor of psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told TV's "Good Morning America" people generally are working to find a way to integrate the social networking Web site -- which has more than 350 million active users worldwide -- into their lives without letting it take them over.
"We're not going to be taking away the Internet," Turkle said. "It's more a question of living with these devices that so compel us, in a way that serves our human purposes."
Michigan high-school sophomore Neeka Salmasi told "GMA" she found her grades slipping because she was spending so much time on Facebook.
"It's like an addiction," Salmasi said. "You look up one moment and it's day and you look up another moment and it's night."
The teen said her solution is to have her sister change her Facebook password at the beginning of
every week and hide it from her until weekends.
Monica Reed and Halley Lamberson, teens who are best friends in California, also told the program they decided to limit their Facebook use to one Saturday a month because they were spending too much time online.
Internet safety expert Parry Aftab agreed some teens use the Internet so much "things are out of balance."
"They aren't doing things offline," she said. "They're all-consumed."
Copyright 2009 by United Press International.
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