New Study Proves Tweeting, Texting and Facebooking Improves Family Harmony at Holidays

Twitter saves the planet!

DATELINE BERKELEY: A study, published today in the Berkely Journal of Useless Information, shows a "significant" correlation between the use of Twitter, cell phone texting, Facebook posting and the reduction of stress at family holiday gatherings.  Director of the study, Dr. Makindis Tüghoup, believes that social media acts as a kind of emotional "safety valve", allowing family members to release tension brought on by having too many people in one place who know embarrassing stories about each other.

The article entitled, "The Social Media Safety Valve: The Health Benefits of Tweeting", has been hailed as a break-through by psychologists who have long been looking for a potential treatment protocol for Family Holiday Dysfunctionality Disorder (FHDD).  FHDD affects some 300 million Americans annually.  Studies into the societal and global impact of FHDD have shown that the disorder causes the following secondary effects.

• Disruption to family harmony caused by attendees at family gatherings resorting to television as a distraction. With four or five TVs running at once in each household, public utility authorities have noted a dramatic increase in power usage during Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day holidays. This increase causes strain to the power grid and a resulting release of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere potentially aggravating global warming.

• Carbonization of a large number of turkeys burned accidentally during family fights. Reduction in the level of turkey carbonization has been show to contribute to carbon-loading in the atmosphere and a potential increase in global warming.

• A dramatic rise in the consumption of anti-depressants, anti-anxiety and anti-acid medications as well as cigarettes, alcohol and marijuana. This is believed to be responsible for cuts in workforce productivity for as long as two weeks following family gatherings.  Productivity suppression is known to result in unnecessary carbon emissions brought on by workers running office machines while napping, drinking and eating funny brownies and by excessive smoke breaks, all of which threaten to increase global warming.

• Global warming due to excessive carbon emissions during agitated verbal interactions between family members during family gatherings.

Dr. Ayahma Phoolahsheet at the National Institute for Mental Healthiness, hailed the study as a landmark, watershed, paradigm shift in efforts to find a cure for FHDD. She believes that Twitter and Facebook may actually turn out to be instrumental in helping arrest human-caused global warming and save the planet.

© 2013 by Tom King