"Oh, that way madness lies; let me shun that."

The quote is from Shakespeare's King Lear, and it applies to the new addictions spawned by the Web and social media; Facebook is the most prominent example.

The addictive, "always on" nature of Facebook etc. may ultimately fail them, as people grow bored, then try to quit the habit.

But don't be fooled by my reference; this is not another screed about a lack of culture and intelligence today, how we're truly on the road to Hell now, kids these days, etc. I spent a far larger portion of my youth watching Wally Gator, reading comic books (the Fantastic Four were my favorites), and getting my hands on the latest copy of Mad Magazine than I did reading Shakespeare, for better or worse.

We loved MAD because of its limited frequency. Not really a monthly, we never knew exactly when the next issue would come out, so my friends and I spent a lot more time than our parents liked hanging around the local cigar store in anticipation of the latest issue. Had we been able to access Mad online every day, around the clock, we would've grown bored, and quickly tired of it.

We joke about our Web addictions, but they can be a serious deal. I'll be clear that I do not equate Mark Zuckerberg or any other successful Web-company executive as the craven sort of people who run tobacco companies. Facebook, along with Google and a few others, have created magnificent monuments to IT performance, and contributed enormously to computer science, scalability, and real-time big-data performance.

Facebook's management has also figured out how to appeal to a tremendously broad spectrum of users old and young, geeky and computerphobic, worldwide. Its limited functionality drives many sophisticated users nuts, but its power in creating a universal, unique medium is as big an accomplishement as what it's achieved technically.

Yet all glory is fleeting, and the challenge to today's social media titans is to continue to make their service interesting and appealing, without effecting that shaky, jangled addictive feeling amongst its users. As amusing as Rupert Murdoch's obtuse ineptitude with MySpace (and now with his tweets) is to many of us, the lesson is that Schumpeter's creative destruction is never more alive and well than in the social-media space.

Mad Magazine is still around, believe it or not, 60 years after its launch. It retains a certain entertainment value to people of many ages, in its own limited fashion. Its "usual gang of idiots" once reached a few million people, but nowhere close to a billion. Its peak value may have been in the tens of millions of dollars, and certainly not $100 billion. I can vouch that it raised the blood pressure of my parents' generation more than any modern-media concoction raises my now-cranky-now-old generation's BP.

Unlike Friendster and MySpace, Mad is not a dead man walking, but alive and well.

But other than the back-cover fold-in, Mad didn't push the limits of technology the way social media are doing today. Innovation is alive and well in our industry; the trick is for the big social-media brands to maintain their usefulness and entertainment value, while somehow cutting down on their addictive nature, lest they become shunned in a tragic, Shakespearean manner.

By the way, I bought a copy of King Lear for five bucks at a local bookstore. Nice read. Good writer. Recommended.