The relationship between social media use and well-being
hbr.org
hbr.org
I mean, I don't really understand the 'feeling inadequate because of my cousin's baby pictures' thing. I mean, I am happy for them, but that isn't the life I want, so I don't feel bad that I don't have it. Alternately, I could be less jealous than most people, but let's run with the more realistic first reason.
For me, the problem with social media is a fundamental lack of self control; I get into 'someone is wrong on the internet' discussions, and for me, those are the 'addictive but not pleasant' aspects of social media. For me, a conversation is not fun if we aren't arguing in good faith ; if we can't acknowledge one another's good points and rhetorical flourishes, it is just not fun, and I end up feeling frustrated and rejected. The unhealthy part is that I feel the discussion is unfinished, and walking away takes a tremendous act of will, and even then, my mind keeps coming back to the conversation.
I hope it is just a matter of practice; I mostly have left other mediums with these sorts of unfufilling conversations, or at least learned to restrain myself from participating in the most obviously unproductive conversations.
I think the big difference with social media is largely cultural; lots of people are there who lack a background in early internet culture or academic culture, and our shared vocabulary doesn't run much past "you are wrong " and there isn't the social pressure to be civil like we have here, or to be smart, like there was in the heyday of kuro5hin.
I think this hits it. Many (most?) people just aren't used to having people disagree with them. Let alone voice those disagreements and be expected to defend their beliefs and explain why they think they're right.
For many people the way they think is correct, just is correct. It's not something that needs defending or even investigating. It's just how things are.
Perhaps the problem is fundamentally how many different people social media exposes us to. And maybe if you weren't exposed to that in your formative years, it's a hard thing to get used to.
Some people are emotivists (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotivism), which means that for them preferences are moral positions in themselves, not just reasons about the morality of preferences.
it is “… the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.”
In other words, emotivism holds that there can be no way of rationally justifying one’s claims about controversial issues.
I think this view describes a great many number of people; though it's true that academia, STEM, and rational enlightenment thinking tends to filter it out or select against it.
And I don't think that's what I was pointing towards. My comment is about the idea that people aren't used to having their beliefs investigated or challenged. No matter what the basis is for their existence.
It's more a lack in their environment than in themselves I think. You can't get used to defending your beliefs until you're exposed to people and ideas that challenge them.
I mean it's fine if your defense is "That's what feels right". But it's not fine if your response to "I think you're wrong" is to think you're being attacked and it makes you feel superbad.
> "I think you're wrong" is to think you're being attacked
This is exactly what the emotivist thinks because challenging an idea means challenging a preference which is directly challenging the moral character of the individual. There is no ability to discuss things in a detached way for them; this seems to check out anecdotally.
Is that "not fine?" - I certainly don't like it, and I don't think it's fine for people i choose to interact with, but my first step is to understand it, if only because there are so many people like this. Folks will continue to act like this despite my desire to see the opposite behavior, so it's good to be prepared and not self-deceive what other people are really like.
> My comment is about the idea that people aren't used to having their beliefs investigated or challenged.
I think I get where you're coming from. someone people not used to something could be said to having a deficiency in dealing with that situation and presumably with more experience they would change their behavior.
But I think there may be a slight difference in what I was saying, which includes some overlap with your point, but also allows for people who are quite familiar with being challenged, but yet immediately disapprove of such behavior anyways, due to the explanations above.
If I come across someone who really thinks that way, they get dismissed and I lose 100% of any shred of respect I may have had for that person.
I don't care if that's considered closed minded, the mindset is wrong, fullstop, and it's obvious to anyone with a modicum of thinking skills.
The idea you've described here can be true sometimes depending on the subject matter, but it is not nearly true all the time, and if someone is unable to recognize that, then I cannot trust anything they say, and it's not worth the mental or emotional energy to engage them.
Very well, but I don't believe that is what I described or claimed.
I've noticed a few older, more experienced 'intelligent-rational' types who have developed techniques to deal with emotivists. For instance, they tend to couch criticism or disagreement in words like "Now it's probably just because I'm not as well acquainted with this issue as you are, but..." To my ears, this sort of language sounds disingenuous and insincere (and talking this way doesn't come naturally to me). But it's hard to dispute the results. I'm constantly amazed at how effective this approach can be.
I suspect this approach is effective, even though it feels like it shouldn't be, because people who are tied up in their own emotions don't pay close attention to what others are saying, and how they're saying it. The way the language 'feels' doesn't activate their heuristic-defensiveness and usually manages to slip past.
And some people like myself just don't feel like sitting around arguing all day.
So much complaining about arguments in social media boils down to "they didn't let me be!", rarely accompanied by an explanation of what the opinion stated was, as if it didn't matter.
If opinions matter, feelings will get hurt. There's ways to mitigate this to some degree, but at the end of the day many positions are irreconciliable, and just because people stop talking about it doesn't mean that it won't eventually bubble up.
That said, avoiding obvious minefields like FB seems like a wise choice too.
I disagree that argument is about recognizing each other's rhetorical flourishes. Argument is much, much, much more often about people opposed to each other, and bystanders making a decision about who won.
See: courts.
Beyond that, I agree utterly about the notion that argument is too often seen as a sport or a "winning" game. The best arguments IMO are ones in which both parties are reaching out to each other, trying to make a point or communicate some idea. It's a contest, but it's also cooperative when everything goes well.
I think about the Wright Brothers, who used the old rhetorical trick of, when they reached an impasse, switching positions in an argument. That's the way to do it! You can be hugely invested in a position, but still be willing to challenge it.
It's nice to have and good when it happens, but many arguments boil down to matters where there are, in very real terms, winners and losers.
Not everything can be patched up procedurally, nor can people "switch up" when it's eg: a black man told to try to understand the slaver's argument.
It's good to develop some capabilities to cope with difficult and heated discussions.
They don't end in agreement, they begin with cooperation; you might not resolve the argument, or your position might prevail, or even change. As you say, there is no argument to be had in some cases, there is no reason. I'm talking about a methodology, rather than an outcome; you can still disagree.
That said, in the case of something like the slave and their master, I'd suggest that an argument is pointless in any case; what's needed is a fight (in the literal sense).
Like abortion, or wealth inequality, or police brutality, or gay rights, or race and IQ.
Wow! That's insanely good. You'd actually get to do one of two things; see the holes in your argument or see the holes in the opposing argument. Works both ways.
Why not control yourself to not reply to people you know aren't going to have a healthy discussion with you? Surely the same issue exists in real life?
Of course their friends who I don't know can also see my comment, and they quickly weigh in with their un-thought out vitriol. I try to keep the discussion going for a little while, but they quickly degenerate it into ad-hominem attacks (which is impressive because I am a stranger to them) and I give up.
Sounds similar to real life though when serious topics come up...some people aren't interested in their views being challenged, get overly defensive and don't care about what an ad-hominem attack is. You're best either avoiding those kinds of conversations or those kinds of people.
Online, there is no escape short of opting out entirely.
In all, social media gives a megaphone to strident opinions, and has a chilling effect on everyone else.
Facebook thrusts humans into very unnatural environments and just says "have at it"
You can't both have your opinion matter, and disagreements of opinion not matter.
So you never confront each other about their opinions directly, you just let the market mediate for you.
It is also possible that something about Facebook makes it harder to deal with, and I simply have left other platforms that have that problem to that degree, and I just haven't left, hoping that I will get it figured out.
I've been tempted to reply to anti-GM food posts for example but it's very obvious how it would degenerate.
When I occasionally do stumble into an internet conversation on Facebook or the like where the absence of experience with all those older cycles of internet culture is palpable it feels like I am wasting hard earned skill.
Let's educate everyone so that we get an even better internet than the one we came to love back in the 90s and early 00s!
Just got a recommendation for this great correlating speech by a friend actually:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxBQLFLei70&feature=youtu.be...
I concur. I've never understood this, and tbh haven't met anyone who does.
> For me, the problem with social media is a fundamental lack of self control...
I find this interesting because as a very frequent Facebook user, I don't really encounter this there, I guess due to the whole filter-bubble kind of effect of social circles. Facebook discussion are all reinforcing rather than combative, so the question of good faith debate rarely even comes into it at all. The echo chamber has it's own reputation for being "bad for you" for other reasons however.
> I mostly have left other mediums with these sorts of unfufilling conversations
I've definitely engaged in one or two of these on HN, but generally they're in a tiny minority. As an alternate example though, while I don't really tweet, and I figure Twitter is a more likely medium for those sorts of "unfulfilling conversations", it seems to offer a lot of value to counter-balance that aspect.
This is exacerbated by not having the luxury of taking cues from facial expressions, body language, smiles and the context of the situation. Moreover, f2f discussions are mostly real time and synchronous vs the social media ones being asynchronous, allowing people to pick up days old thread and continue the discussions, thus there is no end at all if one decides to weave the topic further.
This is caused by this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
Exactly. You end up judging your interior by others' exterior. They show you a highly edited version of their life, made to impress everyone else. You're doing nothing but constantly chasing a phantom life you can never have, because no one else really has it either.
When I'm stuck at my desk and I see someone posting vacation pictures from Spain, I say "man, that looks nice, I wish I was there!" And that's it. Maybe it makes me think about where I want to go next, but it doesn't send me into some existential crisis.
I wonder if there are personality types more prone to being affected by stuff like this? If anything, I'd think I would -- certainly prone to depression, particularly in my younger years. But I just don't care. I wonder why that is, and what is different among people who are affected by these things differently.
But I feel as if it caused the same effect in me as it causes in others, I'd be talking about how I'm going to "take a break" from $socialnetwork for a month, and how much better I feel, and so on. But I don't. It's just a tool. I use it and enjoy it. If I didn't, I wouldn't.
Some of my favorite Facebook friends are the ones who post stuff like "there goes my 'no more Taco Bell' resolution, bring on 2018!" on, say, January 10.
I think this lends itself towards intimacy, rather than exhibitionism.
Seems it easier to be a troll on Facebook, not Snapchat.
More productive at work. Significantly less angry.
The big one is that I'm making much more of a point to spend time with people who actually live near me rather than chatting it up with my friends from college.
I think people take for granted how much of a motivator a little bit of loneliness can be.
The reality is the number of tenuous social "connections" I had went down, and the number of high quality connections went up, since I now actually have to invest time in those relationships (which I've also come to value quite a bit more).
And I couldn't agree more with your comment about being less angry. Facebook is the worst kind of soapbox...
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html
"It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.
It’s a similar story with my two sisters. After living in a house with them for 10 and 13 years respectively, I now live across the country from both of them and spend maybe 15 days with each of them a year. Hopefully, that leaves us with about 15% of our total hangout time left.
The same often goes for old friends. In high school, I sat around playing hearts with the same four guys about five days a week. In four years, we probably racked up 700 group hangouts. Now, scattered around the country with totally different lives and schedules, the five of us are in the same room at the same time probably 10 days each decade. The group is in its final 7%.
So what do we do with this information?
Setting aside my secret hope that technological advances will let me live to 700, I see three takeaways here:
1) Living in the same place as the people you love matters. I probably have 10X the time left with the people who live in my city as I do with the people who live somewhere else.
2) Priorities matter. Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by you—not by unconscious inertia.
3) Quality time matters. If you’re in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you’re with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious."
Previously, conversations would go something like this...
Her, "Did you hear so-n-so had a baby?" Me, "Yep."
Now it goes like this...
Her, "Did you hear so-n-so had a baby?" Me, "Really? That's great news, was it a boy or girl?"
Very similar thing happened with my mom, except with my friends from high school.
I was under the impression that having loose ties is important for various reasons in life, assuming they aren't taking up significant mindshare with non-essential things. (Then it's not really a 'loose tie')
Would rather offer congrats in person than write a generic message on their social media wall.
I think if you let Facebook consume your life and it somehow impacts you a lot you need to think about why that is and not blame Facebook. You could get equally obsessed with hackernews comparing yourself to other users and clamouring for upvotes.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28093386
> We investigated the associations of Facebook activity and real-world social network activity with self-reported physical health, self-reported mental health, self-reported life satisfaction, and body mass index. Our results showed that overall, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with well-being. For example, a 1-standard-deviation increase in "likes clicked" (clicking "like" on someone else's content), "links clicked" (clicking a link to another site or article), or "status updates" (updating one's own Facebook status) was associated with a decrease of 5%-8% of a standard deviation in self-reported mental health.
So it's not a causal link then? If it's not there's surely many reasons why having low well-being would make you spend more time on social networks (e.g. you'd go out less so have more time to spend on social networks)?
I suspect that any hate of facebook has a fair bit to do with the fact that it is 1) pervasive, 2) a fairly closed system, and 3) comes with a lot of strings attached. The fact that it's a closed system is really the crux of the issue, everything else just kind of accentuates the problem. Here's an example of why facebook's existence is annoying
My local climbing gym, for example, has a website, but instead of posting information there, they post most of their updates (like competition dates) on Facebook. Without having a facebook account (and regularly checking it!) there's no way to keep up-to-date on these postings. Now, if you create a facebook account, there's no good way to tell people "don't send me messages here, just email me", so now you have to keep an eye on your facebook messages, otherwise your friends will get annoyed that you're ignoring them. Facebook doesn't implement IMAP or anything though, so your also stuck going to their website regularly, or install their software on your phone and saying goodbye to your once-long battery life.
This is not a surprise. I quit Facebook specifically because of the endless stream of "my life is amazing" posts of people beig happy without any balance. Reminds me of those awful Christmas letters people send round about how wonderful their entire year had been and how amazing their children are.
I don't see the signs in the real world.
Having said that I too almost never used it from the beginning. I didn't need so many years to figure out why I'm not going to like it. I was on it in the early days just as a techy interested in internet technology then I gave it up and never looked back.
Mind you it has become only more socially costly to not be on it. A few times I tempted to get back in again at least in a limited capacity (just having a basic profile so people can message me if needed). But didn't.
I have also heard harsh comments and so on.
Like one person said (not directly to me) ... "what do you mean?!! don't you have any friends?".
More than anything what I find annoying is this expectation from the society that every person in the world must subject themselves to the invasion of Facebook for their convenience and amusement.
I don't go around ordering everyone must eat at my favorite Pizza joint. Why should the people be pressured to some private social network?
If it was more like email that isn't owned by any one entity I would be more understanding.
Definitely. If it operated in a Manner similar to Mastodon then FB would be a lot more tempting to use for the limited purposes I feel I need access. All I would like to use it for is to get an RSS feed of news from various clubs and to be able to reply to such posts (e.g. to confirm that I'll attend an event they've advertised). Unfortunately, FB disabled the RSS feed some time ago and to use rss-bridge (https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge) requires configuring proxies or trying to solve captchas. Even browsing the public page for an event will shove login boxes or random captchas in my face, and the more it is rammed down my throat the more I wish to avoid it.
After the insanely contentious, toxic US election and cry of grief and fear from the left over the results, I got so burnt out with getting on FB and seeing so many reasons to be angry and afraid. Cut myself off completely and after a short time I completely forgot about it. The urge to check FB is totally gone, I feel like I'm missing nothing. It was a great decision, only wish I had made it sooner.
The article linked below describes some of the anti-features that make slack addictive. I have no reason to believe that slack and facebook are not aware of the addictive power of their products and do not cynically designin their products to enhance their addictive potential. https://medium.com/@satyavh/the-real-reason-slack
If your scientific test shows you that feature set A has better user retention than feature set B, you don't need to worry yourself over why.
I was thinking about ditching the platform before making a rather abrupt decision to move to the other side of the world for a couple of years. That couple of years has turned in to 5 and counting, and it's really come in to its own.
I've got a fairly heavily curated feed after I stopped following a bunch of people and pages, so I don't really feel like anything is being shoved in my face any more than other places I frequent online.
It works. It's asynchronous so the timezone difference doesn't get in the way, while still being a heap more useful than email. It definitely maintains connections that I'd struggle to keep otherwise. Now, will I keep it once I return home? There's a good question.
It's just seems better for my health to live my life instead of seeing someone else live their's. Hell, maybe some day my accomplishments will make someone else feel bad about their lack of any. I mean, even Caesar cried when he read about Alexander's conquests.
Overplaying any game is bad for the mental health of the player. Relatedly, a game becomes unhealthy whenever the game becomes the center of the player's life. This applies equally to WoW, Civilization, Facebook, or Twitter, or any other game.
So, social media is a game that can be fun to play, but it shouldn't be a component of the player's identity.
The current setup of giving info to a company and that company pushing all sort of crap on me is not for me. Granted they could do the machine learning on their side but these for-profit ad driven corporations do not have the users best interest in mind. They just want to get us hooked.
Ghost can have this feature!
> Facebook, meanwhile, continued to add to the variety of posts available to their algorithmically generated feed. Yes, the early adopters who had gone to the trouble to tune their feed complained, but the real beneficiaries were users who didn’t want to go to the trouble of making sure they saw something interesting — whether related to friends and family or not — whenever they visited Facebook. And, starting in 2009, those users had even less motivation to get Twitter working: Facebook was good enough.
The cumulative impact of a constant feed of this was incredibly demotivating.
It's even worse when you're struggling through serious financial problems and/or a divorce, or some event like that. Nobody really wants to be your friend, and nobody wants to hear about it.
Online:
(a) One is more likely to find others in the same boat sooner or later, although those people are also more likely to have turned into embittered cranks/ideologues. But at least it's someone.
Divorce IRL is a very lonely experience; just when you are most psychologically vulnerable and could really use a friend, you become radioactive. Double if you're a bootstrapped entrepreneur, since your already existing problems have just leapt from "minor-league brush fire" to "apocalyptic conflagration seen from low orbit".
(b) While, one's not going to post much about these types of issues on social media in general, it allows you to keep conforming with your wider circle. You can keep on riding this carousel of wide-eyed, facile, optimistic communication on trivial or theoretical topics. It's much harder IRL, where it's harder to conceal that actually, real talk, things are really, really shitty.
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/how-to-live...
A few weeks in I was amazed at how I did not miss the social network at all and surprised that the contacts that previously only contactef me on fb now wrote email and text messages.
It tastes great but if you stop buying it, you'll feel so much better, and wonder why you thought you "needed" it all along. I've been off (deactivated) for 4-5 years, maybe longer, and I rarely miss it. I have a pretty active in-person social life, though.
Really the only pain for me were fb events. In my country fb events are the most important calendar to the point that many of the venues/places put events just on fb. The problem is that i organize events from time to time and its impossible without account. Its also getting pretty hard to make fake account (they require copy of ID for new accounts now).
The events are even more pain because they dont have api. Its on purpose. Venues for example cant have automated posting of events from their site. You have to make events in the fb ui. They are read only so people started opposite aproach, they post ebents on fb and consume them in their site. Its limiting and just againts everything internet used to be about.
However, also anecdotally, my mom and brother seem to thrive on it. It's a part of their daily ritual, and the few times they've decided to get rid of Facebook, they claim (and seem) to be missing a part of their identity. They don't live "amazing" lives, and most posts are pretty ordinary.
>5,208 adults from a national longitudinal panel maintained by the Gallup organization
So, anecdotally, I do think that there is a subsection of the population for which this this a positive influence. Or they've found a way to use it positively. It may help to study narrower bands of populations to determine if this holds true across the board.
Only regret is that I probably can't get hired by Facebook now... :-)
Haven't had an actual FB account in 4 or 5 years. I'm sure they were aware but to their credit no one ever asked me about it.
Does this mean they only studied Facebook, or did they look at other social media networks as well? It seems to me that it is the former, but I'm not sure. I imagine different networks would have different effects based on the way people use them.
You can't live a full life if you spend most of your time interacting with people on websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, FourChan, Instagram, etc. It's just not the social experience we evolved to enjoy.
Also there's the danger that you're being subtly manipulated by the moderators or programmers of such sites, or the wider community. Are these 'people' you talk to really real? You can never know for sure.
In the end, if you want a quality social experience, you have to get out of your basement and enjoy the company of people in real life.
1) the more friends I add, the more likely I am to add that guy on Facebook. The guy who always posts very annoying political posts, or the guy who posts very smug+condescending posts.
2) I find myself comparing with my friends, especially when they post pics of them on vacation or news of some promotion.
3) I spend too much time worrying about how to curate posts and post stuff that a. impresses people and b. doesn't offend anyone.
I probably just care too much what others think, but that's my 2c.
We all have quirks that other people might find distasteful. As an easy jump off point, the pr0n habits of people vary wildly, and I'd wager if everyone knew what someone was into... The more you know about many people, the more chance there is that a part you uniquely find distasteful will emerge.
On top of that, the modern world in general, and SM specifically, has melded the public world, the private world and, most annoying of all, the inner world into a single, undifferentiated miasma. All these posts I see of people who can't work with Trump voters, or the religious right, or gay people or whatever shows how this melding causes real problems, even if it alleviates others.
We now know too much about people, and that isn't a universal positive.
There's like a handful of truly useful things on the Internet. Most of the useless things though take up 90% of time on it.
I'm failing to see the value at this point.
edit: formatting
The book, along with others like Hooked, remind me that we have to be very careful about the technology we use on a day to day basis, because it effects our brains in a way we might not want it too. Our brain and willpower is being tested against the skills of thousands of incredibly smart and talented designers, developers, product managers, et al.
Having chosen to abstain from apps like Facebook or social media websites, I don't feel like I lost anything. If anything, I've regained more time and mental space for things like getting deeper in my career. I'm not a luddite, as I am still a big believer in the productivity and information gains via the internet and computers. But our attention is a resource that a lot of companies want. And yet, I only feel like it's more recently that we've begun to question whether the benefits these companies give to us is worth the change in ourselves.
Because of mindfulness, I have recognized the need to distract myself (via Twitter, Reddit, E-mail, Whatsapp) is sometimes a symptom of not wanting to deal with something that is hard or uncomfortable (e.g. paperwork, making a decision, etc.).
Yet we know that become deep at something we care about, we truly do need focused time (Deep Work by Cal Newport is a worthwhile read). So I think it's really in our best interest to only choose apps that provide a lot of benefits with only marginal drawbacks to our mind, and to be very careful about how often we use them.
Although I happily put plenty of hours into single player RPGs (currently Persona 5 and Breath of the Wild). But those have an ending, and they don't require me to schedule my life around them in order to play them.
In fact they let me drop in and out of them very quickly, since they suspend and I don't have to connect to any networks.
This article makes me feel not so antisocial anymore, thank you! :D
In a way, this and studies like it are damning to Facebook's core mission to connect everyone in the world.
Of course among those there are also people getting sick, divorced, fired, and so on, but they are not going to necessarily post on social media about it, so your view on what is "normal" becomes more and more skewed and makes you feel worse and worse about what's going on with you, despite the fact that objectively you might be doing just fine.
I would check facebook a lot more often if they had an option to hide all external links / images. I know there are browser plugins that enable this but they're not on mobile.
I like the opium analogy. Socially acceptable as long as the East India Company is forcing it down our throats. (But at least we'll get Hong Kong out of it!)
There was a point I worried that one or both of them would become a mandatory authentication mechanism for other sites.