David Foster Wallace wrote a very similar essay about television and how it makes people depressed.<p>He argues that TV makes people feel lonely by showing other people having fun. At the same time, TV is a short-term cure for loneliness because the viewer gets to hang out with their friends inside the TV. Wallace calls TV a "malignant addiction", because the act of watching TV is a short-term cure for the harmful effects of TV. Alcohol is another common malignant addiction; exercise addiction is an example of a non-malignant addiction.<p>The essay is called E Unibus Pluram. Full text here (pdf): <a href="http://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf</a>
I think this is an interesting and fair article, but based on the evidence discussed, it isn't "Facebook makes me sad" but rather "my unhealthy comparisons of my own happiness to the happiness of others makes me sad." Sure, divorcing your sense of self-worth from your perceptions of others is easier said than done, but it's a healthier pursuit than attacking one of the thousands of ways other people demonstrate their surface superiority.
<p><pre><code> Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean-favoured and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good Morning!" and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich, yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine -- we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet in his head.
</code></pre>
Edwin Arlington Robinson
When facebook makes me sad, it's usually because I've just read a jaw-droppingly ignorant politcal tirade from someone I went to high school with.<p>Active use of the "Hide from news feed" option makes facebook a much happier place.
Nice piece. Something my female friends always do on FB, and that I half-expected the article to mention, is the 'perfect day' status update.. ie one along the lines of 'walk in the park, dinner at Mario's, curled up on the couch with <insert partner name here> and a glass of wine, perfect!' ... the scenarios described might be different, but the common factors are the veneer of amazingness, and the fact that they always end with a declaration: 'lovely', or 'great', or 'perfect'.<p>(This is one of David O'Doherty's 'beefs', towards the end here: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCgYIP-v-e0" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCgYIP-v-e0</a> )
On a somewhat related note, I have banned myself from Facebook for the past month now. I'm working full time on my startup and I felt that Facebook was a waste of precious time in my day.<p>And boy, was I right.<p>My productivity has been fantastic. I feel energized and motivated to work 16 hours a day. I honestly don't think I've ever been happier in my life.<p>I've come to realize that Facebook is a distraction...a distraction from your real life; what's actually important.<p>Yet over 1 in 4 pageviews in the US are hitting Facebook's website. Millions of people everyday are sitting in front of a screen trying to socialize online.<p>How sad does that sound??
Great read.
I recently discovered that when comparing my facebook feed to my GF's, she had nothing but posts from friends and their new families (babies/marriages/etc.) while mine is typically links to news, witty quotes, and people venting. I had no idea girls indeed do spend more time on facebook posting only the positives of their life. I would think that definitely keeps out requests for help or posting only mediocre content.
one of the main reasons I stopped using facebook was for this very reason. While I was in the lab, working my but off, all of my friends were having fun. It was very clear I was alone and anti-social (even though this is far from the truth)!<p>I had a lot of fun in college, but it didn't look that way to me. In retrospect, FB would definitley depress me. Don't even get me started about the FB movie...
Part of the problem is that we write facebook content as "public" content (i.e. the press release version of our lives) but we tend to process it as "personal" updates that substitute for actually catching up with someone on the phone or in person.<p>So whereas if you were chatting 1:1 with a good friend, they'd be just as likely to gripe about problems as brag about what's great, they're not going to do that to 500 of their closest "friends". And it skews our view of the world since we are now getting only positive info in a channel that used to provide a more realistic ratio of good to bad.
I find that I do experience a lot of negative emotions - envy, lust, etc. while browsing Facebook. On the other hand, I like seeing and responding to funny posts from my friends and family.
This isn't about Facebook, it's about narcissism.<p>"Facebook is "like being in a play. You make a character," one teenager tells MIT professor Sherry Turkle in her new book on technology, Alone Together. Turkle writes about the exhaustion felt by teenagers as they constantly tweak their Facebook profiles for maximum cool. She calls this "presentation anxiety," and suggests that the site's element of constant performance makes people feel alienated from themselves."<p><i>You make a character</i>. <i>People feel alienated from themselves</i>. This is textbook stuff, or at least will be until the next edition of the textbook is published - Narcissistic Personality Disorder is being pulled from the DSM. Facebook didn't inadvertently engineer a platform that induces us to represent ourselves as the star in our own movie, they merely built the tool that their users demanded.<p>The sense that you are special, the desire for admiration, a grandiosity that leads you to exaggerate your achievements - these are not symptoms of having a Facebook account, but symptoms of pathological narcissism. The issue is not that we are seeing other people portray their lives as perfect, but that people feel the desire to portray their lives as perfect. Given a communications platform, people are choosing to elevate themselves and establish themselves as superior rather than bond and seek out similarities.<p>The fact that this article introspects and sees Facebook only from the perspective of how it affects the individual user rather than how individual users affect others is itself symptomatic of narcissism. The article could have just as easily have been subtitled "By Making Us Look Good, Facebook Is Making Other People Miserable". It seems trivially superficial, but it's one of the most pressing issues in our society. We are preoccupied with ourselves and no force is trying to check that desire - the media supports this fixation, politicians flatter us, even churches have moved from a culture of submission before god to one of spiritual satisfaction.
<i>This is correlation, not causation, mind you; it could be that those subjects who started out feeling worse imagined that everyone else was getting along just fine, not the other way around. </i><p>Well, at least the article mentioned that no causality has been demonstrated, which is much more than most articles of this nature do.<p><i>But the notion that feeling alone in your day-to-day suffering might increase that suffering certainly makes intuitive sense.</i><p>Well, it might make intuitive sense, but that doesn't mean its correct. One of the symptoms of clinical depression is a distorted view of the feelings of others. In other words, clinically depressed people think that other people are having more fun because they're depressed, not the other way around. A similar phenomenon might be operating here.
I enjoy Facebook.<p>But I actually have few friends who showcase "the most witty, joyful, bullet-pointed versions" of their lives. Perhaps people looking at Facebook from the outside showcase the "showcasers".<p>We mostly exchange idle-chit-chat. Who could guess how healthy that could be!
I know I get serious "presentation anxiety" when confronted with the challenge of with filling out my profile on a dating site. If women are more susceptible to this kind of malaise I wonder if that explains something about why there are 4x less women than men on those sites. Find out a way to make "selling yourself" less threatening and you answer the million dollar question that Match, eHarmony, and all the rest have been racking their brains about for years: Why won't women join?
I found the answer:<p><a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headlines" rel="nofollow">https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Betteridge%27...</a>
I am somewhat miserable. I will not feel unmanly through appearing miserable and vulnerable on facebook, but...<p>I see everything in life as something which helps or hinders me in getting laid. Used properly, facebook can be a help.<p>So that's why I don't let myself appear miserable on facebook. I have a cheeky, "attractive" wall/profile, even if it is somewhat unrepresentative. If it makes girls feel inadequate because I'm too cool for them, mission accomplished.