There is an undesirable fascination towards the question that what effect does Facebook has on the lives of the million users that are using it, but the answer has been more complicated then it seems. There are all sorts of debate on the positive and negative impacts that Facebook has.
Maria Konnikova pointed out in her extremely helpful 2013 rundown of the research that the mixed messages are probably the result of “Facebook” being such a broad topic. As the researcher Samuel Gosling told her, “What makes it complicated is that Facebook is for lots of different things and different people use it for different subsets of those things. It makes intuitive sense. If one person uses Facebook only to accept party invites and the other uses it to obsessively comb through pictures of exes, you would imagine the site having different effects on these two individuals. And tons of researchers think that what matters the most is how frequently Facebook users compare themselves to other people an inevitable human tendency that’s been known to lead to unhappiness.
When Facebook was founded in 2004, it began with a seemingly innocuous mission: to connect friends. Some seven years and 800 million users later, the social network has taken over most aspects of our personal and professional lives, and is fast becoming the dominant communication platform of the future. But this new world of ubiquitous connections has a dark side. It has been noted that Facebook and social media are major contributors to career anxiety. After seeing some of the comments and reactions to the post and stories that are posted on social media, it’s clear that Facebook in particular takes it a step further: It’s actually making us miserable.
In a recent study in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, a team led by Mai-Ly N Steers of the University of Houston attempted to better understand the connections between Facebook, happiness, and social comparison. In two studies, they tracked the depressive symptoms and Facebook usage habits of a group of students at a Southwestern university. Overall, they found that the more time a given student spent on Facebook, the stronger the depressive symptoms they experienced. That connection, though, was influenced by how frequently the student in question compared themselves to others on Facebook — so things aren’t quite as simple as “Facebook causes depression”. This was a co-relational study, so the standard disclaimer applies: There could be other stuff that the researchers didn’t catch that is responsible for the connections they observed. And as with any study done on a group of college students, it’s fair to ask whether folks who aren’t in college might behave differently on, and react differently to, Facebook.
Apart from this research, when I myself started to look at the current scenario and the Facebook usage some astonishing facts deemed upon me. Firstly I found out that all the liking and the disliking the commenting the sharing all have factors of anxiety, jealousy and in some cases depression. First, it’s creating a den of comparison. Since our Facebook profiles are self-curated, users have a strong bias toward sharing positive milestones and avoid mentioning the more humdrum, negative parts of their lives. Accomplishments like, “Hey, I just got promoted!” or “Take a look at my new sports car,” trump sharing the intricacies of our daily commute or a life-shattering divorce. This creates an online culture of competition and comparison. The compulsion to compare ourselves with other is only human nature and cannot be changed what changes is that what we choose to abide by it. Whether we let it make us miserable or are we happy in our own skin.
Comparing ourselves to others is a key driver of unhappiness. Tom De Long, author of Flying without a Net, even describes a “Comparing Trap.” He writes, “No matter how successful we are and how many goals we achieve, this trap causes us to recalibrate our accomplishments and reset the bar for how we define success. “And as we judge the entirety of our own lives against the top 1 percent of our friends’ lives, we are setting impossible standards for ourselves, making us more miserable than ever.
Second, it’s fragmenting our time. Not surprisingly, Facebook’s “horizontal” strategy encourages users to log in more frequently from different devices. This means that hundreds of millions of people are less “present” where they are. When you are using Facebook time seems to fly by and you are not present in situations where you should be. Facebook usage has become a cause of few traffic accidents even.
Leaving the risk of real physical harm aside, the issue with this constant “tabbing” between real-life tasks and Facebook is what economists and psychologists call “switching costs,” the loss in productivity associated with changing from one task to another. Famed author Dr Srikumar Rao attributes mindfulness over multitasking as one of his ten steps to happiness at work. He argues that constant distractions lead to late and poor-quality output, negatively impacting our sense of self-worth.
As Facebook advances in making or lives more comfortable and making us closer to our friends knowing where they are what they are doing we are becoming more and more void of real life connection our real relationships are suffering due to the very thing that had hoped to bring us closer every time we like a picture or tag someone we miss a moment that could have been spent with them. As Facebook continues to add new features to help us connect more efficiently online, the battle to maintain off-line relationships will become even more difficult, which will impact their overall quality, especially in the long-run. Facebook is negatively affecting what psychology Professor Jeffrey Parker refers to as “the closeness properties of friendship.”
So, what should we do to avoid these three traps? Recognising that “quitting” Facebook altogether is unrealistic, we can still take measures to alter our usage patterns and strengthen our real-world relationships. Some useful tactics I’ve seen include blocking out designated time for Facebook, rather than visiting intermittently throughout the day; selectively trimming Facebook friends lists to avoid undesirable ex-partners and gossipy co-workers; and investing more time in building off-line relationships. The particularly courageous choose to delete Facebook from their smartphones and iPads, and log off the platform entirely for long stretches of time.
Facebook is making us unhappy or not that is long and tiring debate that can never be truly won on either side. The excess usage of everything is bad that stands for Facebook too. Through the process of writing this essay I have concluded that a thing cannot harm you unless you give it power over yourself to get harmed. Where Facebook and other social medias are making you unhappy and depressed they are the ones that are a source of hope and awareness for many people the main thing resides in the usage of the application. The application itself is not the enemy it usage defines its success and failure.