A recent study by a group at the University of Pennsylvania looking into youth communication found that Facebook was the thing users could most easily live without. This small preliminary study asked 84 randomly selected students between 18 and 24 to compare email, text, cellphone and Facebook with how easily it would be to go without one of them.

Participants were asked to put a monetary value on what they thought reasonable compensation for not using each medium for a week. Facebook came out the cheapest at $44 while perhaps surprisingly email was highest at an average of $99.

Due to the small sample this finding can't be rolled out to the larger population, but it does raise some interesting questions about connectivity, communication and the role of social networking sites in today's environment.