BBC documentary brings fresh hope to Facebook addicts

You're drawn from your early morning slumber by the repetitive beep of your alarm clock. After doing the ‘toilet and kitchen' thing, you find yourself at once relieved and energised. Where does your thought go next? For hundreds of millions of people across the planet, the next thing that happens is a hand reaches for a PC, laptop, tablet or smartphone to connect to Facebook. It's almost a textbook definition of addiction. But now there could be hope. KitGuru takes a moment away from poking friends to watch a short BBC video which could help.

Upfront, let us tell you: Don't worry if you don't know where Vermont is, KitGuru has done the Google mapping for you and determined that it's almost half way between Montreal and Boston in the United States of America. Or, if you prefer Apple Maps, it's a suburb of Rio in Brazil.

Vermont Mountain School became the destination for a group of students who were using technology too much. After a survey ran in the States determined that many children were online with sites like Facebook for more than 2 hours a day – and a hardcore of 25% were on there for more than 5 hours (which is quite a lot) – a bunch were selected to go spend some time in an educational institution where the interwibble is hard to come by.

More than 40 of the worst ‘offenders' were shipped off to this backwater location, to see how their approach to life, technology and all other things Facebook changed if they were cut off from the modern world and forced to deal with each other as humans.

Watch the 3:36 revelation over on the Beeb, here. Cool animated GIFs here.

KitGuru says: One young lady summed up her Facebook-free existence by saying that it will be hard to be around people who, if they are not 100% engaged by what you're saying, will simply look down at their phones to see if they can join someone else's conversation. Sound familiar?

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