Is Facebook making us sad?
slate.com
slate.com
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.
The essay is called E Unibus Pluram. Full text here (pdf): http://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf
(I'm not asking you, the parent poster. Merely wondering aloud, I suppose.)
Interestingly, some might argue that his depression afforded him the clarity to have this view. Conversely, the lack of depression clouds the views of others:
"Depressive realism is the proposition that people with depression actually have a more accurate perception of reality, specifically that they are less affected by positive illusions of illusory superiority, the illusion of control and optimism bias"
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/03/science/sci-tv3
"Unhappy people glue themselves to the television 30 percent more than happy people."
It's assumed the TV is causing the depression, whilst I'm sure it's the lack of social interaction that is causing the depression. This is ignorant generalization. Are sports fans who get together to watch the game 8% more likely to be depressed? I seriously doubt it, because they've got 2/3 friends there to spend time with.
If it was mandatory for 3+ people to be in a room for a TV to activate, then this depression figure would disappear, but those socially isolated people who no longer have a TV would probably figure out how to tie a hangman's knot and eliminate themselves from any future asinine statistics.
Personally, I quit Facebook a few weeks ago, and I've been much happier and more productive for it. I might go back at some point, but honestly I don't even feel the urge anymore. I'd rather just be alone when I'm alone. Get work done, sort out my thoughts, etc., and then when I feel like being with people, I'll make the effort to call around or round some people up. Overall I find myself getting more out of both kinds of experience. I've also noticed, strangely enough, that people have tended to seek me out more since I quit Facebook, I suppose since they no longer have an easier alternative for keeping up with me, and when we meet up, it feels like there's actually some catching up to do, as opposed to the feeling that you already know everything that's going on with a person because you constantly post on each others' walls and read their status updates.
This is probably intended as a joke, but it’s really not funny, especially in the context of a discussion of DFW.
Could you not turn the argument around, and say that watching shows like Oz, The Wire or Dexter where the other people definitely aren't having fun makes people feel better?
It's true that technology, perhaps barring technology that directly alters the human brain, can never cause any psychological or social change except via humans using it. But if, for example, people are unhappy when they frequently compare their lives to others, and a particular technology increases how likely they are to do so, I'd say that the technology has caused an increase in unhappiness, via the mechanism of increasing comparisons.
Can happen on the positive side also. I'm comfortable pointing to software as a "cause" for certain kinds of increases in productivity, even though of course it's only the fact that people are using it to do things that increases productivity.
"Everybody hurts."
And that alone can make it suck less, to know that everyone puts up a facade and you're no worse than anyone else.
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.
Active use of the "Hide from news feed" option makes facebook a much happier place.
Interestingly, there was a lot less of that in 2008.
(This is one of David O'Doherty's 'beefs', towards the end here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCgYIP-v-e0 )
Those perfect-veneer updates are quite possibly the venereal infection of Facebook. You just see cluster-infection on groups of 'friends' who all have that annoying mentality to have to one-up the people they claim are their BFF's.
And boy, was I right.
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.
I've come to realize that Facebook is a distraction...a distraction from your real life; what's actually important.
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.
How sad does that sound??
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...
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.
Spot on. That's why I don't use Facebook lately, although I wasn't able to verbalize the reason so well. I feel like I'm reading PRs from my friends, and I feel like I'm compelled to write my own PR, what is time-consuming.
People used to buy expensive clothes or cars to show off. Now they show off in Facebook, posting the pictures of their amazing vacations.
I used to love Facebook when I had less than 50 friends in it. As my number of "friends" grew, everybody's content became more and more like press releases. It didn't happen overnight. It was a slow transformation.
"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."
You make a character. People feel alienated from themselves. 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.
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.
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.
Well, at least the article mentioned that no causality has been demonstrated, which is much more than most articles of this nature do.
But the notion that feeling alone in your day-to-day suffering might increase that suffering certainly makes intuitive sense.
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.
The fact that others hype their positive accomplishments beyond the norm only makes it worse, in my opinion.
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".
We mostly exchange idle-chit-chat. Who could guess how healthy that could be!
Re: the claim in the article, this type of stuff doesn't make me sad or anything, it just creates a lot of noise that I'm not interested in and makes Facebook seem kind of pointless.
I know, I could start trimming my friends list, filtering my feed, etc., but when it comes right down to it, what Facebook originally offered (and IMO, the most important thing that it offered) during the college years was a comfortably small and relaxed social space that contained mostly my peers. Now I'm getting friend requests from everyone in my extended family, and I have to make the choice between unfriending my grandmother and broadcasting all my interactions straight into her feed? Crikey.
I refuse to make that choice, so unless Facebook budges from their "We never intended you to be friends with acquaintances, coworkers, or family members!" party line and allows some sort of finer permissions control, my account's going to stay in zombie-mode.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Betteridge%27...
I see everything in life as something which helps or hinders me in getting laid. Used properly, facebook can be a help.
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.