Online culture's effect on work-life balance

Are we seeing a new trend in Norway?

To write long newspaper comments to explain why you are deleting your Facebook profile?

So far only a few have done it.

Mikael Rønne, an Oslo ballet student, was first. He felt Facebook had started taking over too much of his life.

Author Eirik Newth followed, worried about his personal integrity.

Both sound a bit like people who've just managed to stop smoking.

"As I write this I've been without Facebook for 12 days," writes Mikael Rønne.

He was a student in the USA when Facebook had its breakthrough in American universities. The word Facebook was being used at Harvard in the university's list of all students and what they were studying. When Marc Zuckerberg founded Facebook the company in 2004 it was to digitise this list, but the resulting webpage soon developed in to a gigantic catalogue where everybody could post pictures of them selves and write about their lives.

Today there are 618m Facebook profiles. Three billion pictures are uploaded to Facebook every month. But the most impressive figure is how much time the average Facebook user spends there - which is six hours a month. 

The major Facebook consumers of course spend even more time.

Facebook has a very high penetration in the Nordic countries:

Source: Socialbakers

48 percent of people in the USA have a Facebook profile, and in the UK the number is 45 percent.