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.
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.)
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"
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.
"Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard Medical School looked at the media habits of 4,142 healthy adolescents and calculated that each additional hour of TV watched per day boosted the odds of becoming depressed by 8%."
> "Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard Medical School looked at the media habits of 4,142 healthy adolescents and calculated that each additional hour of TV watched per day boosted the odds of becoming depressed by 8%."
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.
I think it's more that TV and Facebook and such are enablers of less than healthy behavior, not causes. The whole problem is that they DO provide a diminished dose of what healthy socializing provides and continually suppress the motivation to seek out something more substantial. It's sort of akin to snacking on junk food all day long and never eating a real meal. Sure, you can keep yourself from getting hungry, but you're not getting any actual sustenance, and in the long run you will experience feelings way more unpleasant than hunger if you keep it up. It would probably be better if those foods provided no hunger satisfaction at all. Then people could enjoy them occasionally for the taste, but wouldn't be tempted to use them as substitutes for real food.
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.
> 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.
This is probably intended as a joke, but it’s really not funny, especially in the context of a discussion of DFW.
Rather than "TV makes people feel lonely", that's more like "Sitcoms make people feel lonely".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
I suppose that depends on your theory of causation. =]
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.
I do think that site design has something to do with it though. Like the article says, there's only a "like" button on facebook, no "hate" button. I find it interesting how seemingly subtle differences between facebook's "like", HN's down vote rep threshold, and slashdot's variation in types of up vote create very different cultures.
But I really think it should be taken with a grain of salt: I think it's comforting to realize that "hey, life isn't a bed of roses for everyone else either." That's sort of a "glass half full" way to look at something negative...the truth is everyone projects themselves to be better than they are, but deep down we all struggle. So I take from this article exactly what Michael Stipe once said...
"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.
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.
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?
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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!
I can only guess that you don't have many friends with babies. As more and more new moms in my social circle end up on Facebook, I can barely find any real content in my news feed amidst the endless stream of cutesy pictures, "guess what face the little guy made today?", safe-for-all-ages jokes about the husband-wife relationship, etc.
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.
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?
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.
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