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Terms for addicts are easily enough improvised by adding -oholic to the name for a specific social media platform, e.g. “Twitter-oholic,” but is there something more generic, & less unwieldy & artificial than “social-media-oholic”?

Terms for abstainers seem even harder to come by.

The very term “social media” seems to me to provoke the question: “How could any communications medium not be social?”

The M-W definition for “social media” would appear applicable to EL&U itself, so although I am a total abstainer from Facebook & Twitter & even smart phones, one of the addict terms may apply to me, though the recipe above would generate a pretty unwieldy result.

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    Some might suggest that only thing the -oholic suffix isn't unwieldy and artificial after, is alc.
    – Jon Hanna
    Commented May 28, 2014 at 22:58
  • Related.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Jun 7, 2014 at 20:29

3 Answers 3

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A fan of technology might be called a technophile.

The opposite would be called a technophobe.

For the latter, the term Luddite also comes to mind.

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  • These terms imply an addiction or aversion much broader than just to social media, even granting the recent narrowing of the usage of technology to mean just digital electronics ( excluding stone axes, the alphabet, etc.).
    – Brian Donovan
    Commented May 28, 2014 at 18:12
  • @BrianDonovan I don't disagree. On the other hand, the terms you're looking for are probably too new to really be in use yet. You might have to settle for something a little broader, or make up your own word.
    – Kevin Workman
    Commented May 28, 2014 at 18:14
  • Per meta.english.stackexchange.com/a/364 for the use–mention distinction, please use an italic face not a bold one. It makes the page look too heavy otherwise, and furthermore runs counter to typographic convention both on this site and in scholarly works.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Jun 14, 2014 at 15:53
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I think that a person averse to social media can be called social media (networking) phobic while its opposite can be defined as social media (networking) addicted.

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Consider: Off-the-grid.

Notably this part of the second definition:

not traceable through any means of commerce or communication that could be linked to one's identity.

This phrase has historically referred to people who lived without ties to municipal utilities, but it's growing in usage to refer to those who abstain from social media, especially in reference to when a person almost invariably cannot be reached if they aren't on social media.

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  • edit in the definition of your answer and how the sense fits ... you may get votes
    – lbf
    Commented Sep 4, 2018 at 21:31
  • I don't think it fits well. Similarly, not drinking doesn't mean abstainer.
    – Jim Reynolds
    Commented Sep 5, 2018 at 0:01

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