
Is Facebook making us sad? - mcknz
http://www.slate.com/id/2282620/
======
heyjonboy
David Foster Wallace wrote a very similar essay about television and how it
makes people depressed.

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>

~~~
jat850
I can't peer into the mind of David Foster Wallace any more than any of the
rest of us, but is it possible that he wrote this essay borne out of his own
battles with depression? What I mean to say is, did his own depression cloud
his view of television making other people depressed?

(I'm not asking you, the parent poster. Merely wondering aloud, I suppose.)

~~~
mthoms
>... did his own depression cloud his view...?

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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism>

~~~
philwelch
You have to be careful about the studies on depressive realism, though; a lot
of them are poorly designed. I remember reading about one study (and I'm not
100% on the details) where subjects basically interacted with a machine that
flashed lights or something at random, and the depressed ones were more likely
to come to the realization that their actions had no effect on the machine.
The flaw is, if you design a scenario where people's actions really _do_ have
no effect on the outcome, of course you're going to discover that depressed
people have a more accurate perception of reality--not because they actually
do, but because you've put them in a situation that corresponds to their
cognitive bias.

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joshklein
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.

~~~
tjr
I think this has happened a lot. Some new technology makes an existing problem
more obvious or more prevalent, and the problem is blamed on the technology.
Technology may amplify social woes, but it certainly does not cause them.

~~~
quanticle
You also see this a lot with the "cyber-bullying" crowd. Technology did not
cause bullying, and technology cannot fix bullying. The only thing technology
enables is for the bullies to act faster. Rumors can now spread through the
entire school in minutes, rather than hours.

~~~
oregonjoe
isn't speeding up and increasing the reach of bullying making bullying more
powerful then? maybe a bad comparison: but isn't that like saying the truck
didn't change the way we move stuff, it just allowed us to move more things,
quicker.

~~~
Dylan16807
It also made it much cheaper and therefore effective. Is speed very important
to bullying?

~~~
sp332
It's more pervasive. If you're bullied at school but loved at home, it might
be tolerable. But if you're being bullied via email or Facebook 24/7, you
never get a chance to "decompress".

------
AndyKelley

      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.
      

Edwin Arlington Robinson

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powrtoch
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.

Active use of the "Hide from news feed" option makes facebook a much happier
place.

~~~
callmevlad
I personally prefer the "remove from friends list" option in such cases.

~~~
randallsquared
But that's how you eventually get to "How could so-and-so have possibly been
elected?! I don't know _anyone_ who voted for him!" as we saw quite a bit in
2000 and 2004.

Interestingly, there was a lot less of that in 2008.

~~~
krakensden
Perhaps it's because your crowd was on the winning side of that election?

~~~
randallsquared
Because you think only people on the left are so insulated that they don't
know any right-leaning folk, or because you believe I'm on the left and only
read blogs and articles that express such views from the left?

------
PaddyCorry
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'.

(This is one of David O'Doherty's 'beefs', towards the end here:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCgYIP-v-e0> )

~~~
electromagnetic
I've seen a few of these, and knowing the women all I can think are things
like: "So how many oxycontin did you buy that morning to make it that
perfect?" or "Who'd you cheat on your boyfriend with this time?"

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.

~~~
epochwolf
It's the same games high school girls are socialized to play with each other.
Some people (men and women) just never grow out of the social games they play
in high school.

------
ericmsimons
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.

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??

------
yellow
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.

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buckwild
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)!

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...

------
tomkarlo
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.

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.

~~~
gasull
_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._

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.

------
awt
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.

------
jdietrich
This isn't about Facebook, it's about narcissism.

"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.

------
quanticle
_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._

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.

~~~
joezydeco
But the article is talking about the fact that people present only positive
things on Facebook and never discuss the negatives. I've witnessed it first
hand - the lack of balance leads you falsely think everyone is currently
better off than you are.

The fact that others hype their positive accomplishments beyond the norm only
makes it worse, in my opinion.

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joe_the_user
I enjoy Facebook.

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!

~~~
trafficlight
In contrast, I have a growing dislike of some of my friends because of the
false way they portray themselves on Facebook.

~~~
klbarry
How do they portray themselves as facebook? Just hyperbolic versions of
themselves or as different people?

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KMStraub
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?

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shaggyfrog
I found the answer:

[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Betteridge%27...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headlines)

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bigbang
Right now 4702 liked this article on Facebook. Touche.

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aj700
I am somewhat miserable. I will not feel unmanly through appearing miserable
and vulnerable on facebook, but...

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.

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derrida
Facebook is the difference between information and communication.

