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Assignment II (Counter Argument)
“Can Facebook make you sad?”
By Justin Mullins
The New York Times
February 6, 2014
Studies suggest that browsing Facebook can make you unhappy, says Justin
Mullins. Why might that be? This article originally published in February 2014
explains.
Not so long ago a new form of communication swept the world, transforming life
in ways unimagined just a few years before. One commentator heralded it as
“the greatest means of communication ever developed by the mind of man”
while others pointed to its potential to revolutionize news, entertainment and
education. But the poet and playwright TS Eliot had a different take. “It is a
medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same
joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome,” he wrote.
Eliot and the others were writing about television in the early 1960s. But fast
forward 50 years and you could be forgiven for thinking that their comments
apply equally well to the internet, and online social networks.
Chief among these is Facebook. Its statistics are astounding. In just one decade,
it has signed up some 1.3 billion people, half of whom log in on any given day
and spend an average of 18 minutes per visit. Facebook connects families across
continents, friends across the years and people around the world.
And yet Facebook’s effects on its users may not be entirely benign. Some
researchers suggest that the ability to connect does not necessarily make people
any happier, and it could in fact reduce the satisfaction they feel about their life.
Can it really be possible that Facebook makes you sad?
Until recently, few had studied this question and the little evidence that did exist
actually hinted that the social network has a beneficial effect. In 2009, Sebastian
Valenzuela and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin measured how life
satisfaction varied among over 2,500 students who used Facebook, and they
found a small positive correlation.
Yet last summer, a team of psychologists from the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor and the University of Leuven in Belgium decided to drill a bit deeper by
evaluating how life satisfaction changes over time with Facebook use. Ethan
Kross and colleagues questioned a group of people five times a day over two
weeks about their emotional state. They asked questions such as “how do you
feel right now?”, “how lonely do you feel right now?”, “how much have you used
Facebook since we last asked?” and so on. This gave them a snapshot of each
individual’s well-being and Facebook usage throughout the day.
The team found that Facebook use correlated with a low sense of well-being.
“The more people used Facebook over two-weeks, the more their life satisfaction
levels declined over time,” they said. “Rather than enhancing well-being… these
findings suggest that Facebook may undermine it.”
However, there are several possible explanations for the finding. It could be that
people feeling down were more likely to visit Facebook, but the team were able
to rule this out because their data would have revealed if people felt low before
visiting the site.
As Kross and colleagues pointed out, Facebook is an invaluable resource for
fulfilling the basic human need for social contact. But they suspect that the kind
of contact Facebook provides does not make people feel better over time. The
opposite was true of face-to-face contact, according to their data. Perhaps there
is something different about digital social interactions, they suggest.
One possibility might be simple jealousy. After all, it can be disappointing to see
cousins and former school-friends routinely boasting about their career
successes, holidays or new children. Some researchers have referred to this
effect as “friendly world syndrome”, where it seems like everybody is having a
better time than you. The syndrome comes from an effect identified by
sociologists in the 1970s called “mean world syndrome”, where people who
watched a lot of violent TV thought the world was more violent than it actually
is. Your friends on Facebook may be more likely to trumpet their successes than
failures, which can give a skewed picture of what life is really like.
Another similar phenomenon that has emerged in recent years might also explain
this dissatisfaction – your friends are, on average, more popular than you. Back
in 1991, the sociologist Scott Feld uncovered a surprise while studying the nature
of social networks in the pre-internet age. The data came from asking children at
several schools who their friends were, whether these friendships were
reciprocated and then drawing up the resulting network by hand.
Feld counted the number of friends each individual had, and compared that to
the number of friends the friends had. To everyone’s great surprise, he
discovered that a child’s friends almost always had more friends than they did,
on average.
Who's better, who's best
Since then, other researchers have discovered that this “friendship paradox” is a
general feature of social networks and applies to other properties too. Not only
will your friends have more friends than you do, they probably have more sexual
partners too.
Although highly counterintuitive, there is a straightforward mathematical reason
for this. People with lots of friends are more likely to number among your friends
in the first place. And when they do, they significantly raise the average number
of friends that your friends have. People have more friends than you do simply
because the average is skewed.
The rise of online social networks has confirmed all of this, not least because
researchers suddenly have access to a level of detail that was unheard of before
the internet era. According to Nathan Hodas and colleagues at the University of
Southern California, the friendship paradox holds true for more than 98% of
Twitter users too.
Why might that make you feel glum? Unlike physical world friendships, on
Facebook you can see exactly how popular your more popular friends are.
What’s more, last month Young-Ho Eom at the University of Toulouse in France
and Hang-Hyun Jo at Aalto University in Finland found that wealth and happiness
can show the same paradoxical behavior – though it’s not clear why. So even if
many of your friends are like you, the research suggests that there’s a good
chance that there’s at least one significantly wealthier or happier person in your
social network.
Another thing why it is thought that Facebook can make you sad is clarified in
the following words by Amolak Singh. He presented his experience as follows:
“Hello, my name is Amolak Singh. I am 15 years old, and yet I feel much older.
This summer, my parents let me have a facebook account and I just completely
lost my innocence.
Life was so simple before – With my iphone 3GS I used to
spend long hours texting my friends about the latest episodes of Prison Break or
download movies onto my IPAD, or better yet play online games with kids
around the world, killing hundreds of bad guys with deadly explosive weapons in
3d.
But this summer my happy innocence came to an end when my Dad sent me a
friend request and I accepted.
And so just as I was uploading vacation pictures
of myself bodysurfing, I got the request.
My Dad was inviting me to join a
Facebook group on helping child beggars in India.
I ignored the requests for
several days, after all I was very busy – I had just upgraded my cell phone to the
new iphone 4 and I had apps I needed to download, but finally, I joined.
I read my first post because the picture intrigued me – it was of a small, really
skinny child, with an amputated leg. I thought the child was doing the posting,
but it was a post by a teacher travelling in Mumbai, India, telling about the group
of beggar children that sleep on the streets behind her hotel and constantly
follow tourists with their pleas for money.
She was talking about how she had been there for five days and each day had
resisted giving any money to them, despite the helpless little children following
her everywhere, despite seeing their mutilated bodies and the hunger in their
eyes, despite seeing them curled tight into little balls, hugging the alley walls at
night as flies and mosquitoes feasted on their scrawny frames.
In fact, she knew that the children never got to keep any of the money, that the
children were owned by organized gangs who had first either bought or stolen
the children while very young, then mutilated them to make them appear even
more pathetic and now preyed on their earnings from begging.
Giving the
beggars money did not help them at all. Everyday, just to keep her sanity, she
was posting a new picture every hour of a new child beggar on the group wall
for the duration of her 2 week vacation. Well, I was instantly trapped – I read all
her posts from the start of her vacation – I stared into the eyes of each haunting
picture, and my heart sank so low, at the magnitude of it all.
Another post brought before my eyes the gruesome fate of starving children, just
skin and bones, dying daily of starvation in the Horn of Africa. Just one post
from one Facebook friend led me to countless others, interconnecting me to
people around the world – people with information to share about the world we
live and the plight of the billions who will never be as lucky as I am, here in
Canada.
Now there was no going back to my happy innocence – to that state of blissful
ignorance when I knew nothing of starving millions. Once informed, it haunts
you and you cannot become un-informed, no matter how much you may want
to.
So I have come to question everything - how can millions be starving to death
while we waste so much food and spend billions of dollars on useless trivial
material nick nacks that we later just throw out .
Though Facebook made me sad and miserable, I have realized that social media
is a powerful tool that in some countries has helped revolutions to happen. As
the children of the information age where the tiniest detail of suffering anywhere
is just a mouse click away, we do not have the luxury of pleading ignorance or
innocence. My advice to all Facebook users is that you should not just sit back
and use this technology for trivial fun, like I used to, but instead become active.”
This could all make for a quite the downer. And that’s not really so different from
the way television seemed to TS Eliot.