Spending too much time comparing yourself to other people is depressing regardless of the media you use; someone who only reads biographies of wildly successful people will end up just as depressed as someone who spends too much time reading the edited highlights of lives on Facebook. To that end, this doesn't really have anything to do with Facebook. The medium is not the message.
More or less depressed than someone reading biographies of people in poverty and distress? Are people happier when their Facebook feeds contain more complaining? I'd guess that the "envy" effect is pretty marginal. "High levels of Facebook use" sounds to me about the same as "high levels of nail biting" or "high levels of watching cable TV." It's bored, nervous, pseudo-socializing, fruitless activity.
Can't strictly agree to pseudo-socializing or fruitless.
Online conversations have continued offline. Those were actual people I was talking to. Those conversations resume online, often enough. It's part of the fabric.
An invitation to an actual event with actual people received on facebook, because of activity or exposure there, is not fruitless activity.
But it is usually a bored, nervous activity. I can handily agree to that part.
What it "sounds like" to you is just speculation, and to that end it isn't useful. The paper in the article has been published in a peer-reviewed journal and is based on a proper scientific methodology and a pair of psychological studies. The outcome of the studies could be misunderstood but there at least appears to be some evidence for the author's conclusion.
Yeah, just speculation. I can only read the abstract of the article, but it sounds interesting. If someone with access to the journal could summarize the method, that'd be cool.
