If your online life is taking over your real life, it could be time to erase yourself from the internet.

A Dutch company has made a programme which can destroy all posts and personal information from your Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter accounts.

The advantage of the tastefully-named Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is its speed.

Instead of spending nearly ten hours erasing things manually, you can go offline in just 52 minutes.

Some 3,000 people have already used the free programme, with another 90,000 on the waiting list. You hand over your passwords and watch as your Tweets and Facebook friends disappear - until there's just an empty screen.

Last month, one of the country's most eminent brain scientists warned that an obsession with social networking sites and computer games may be changing the way people’s minds work.

Oxford University expert Susan Greenfield believes constant computer and internet use may be ‘rewiring the brain’, shortening attention spans, encouraging instant gratification and causing a loss of empathy.

She said: ‘For me, this is almost as important as climate change.

‘Whilst of course it doesn’t threaten the existence of the planet like climate change, I think the quality of our existence is threatened – and the kind of people we might be in the future.’

The neuroscientist believes technology may be behind the ‘a(chǎn)larming’ rise in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and the growth in the use of anti-hyperactivity drug Ritalin.

But Baroness Greenfield said that although benefits of playing computer games may include a higher IQ and better memory, social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook may hamper empathy.

Using search engines to find facts may hinder our ability to learn, while computer games in which it is always possible to start again, may make us more reckless.

點擊查看更多雙語新聞

(Agencies)