03/10/11 3PM + 4PM Is facebook making us depressed?

A Slate article discussing the findings of a paper in the Journal of Social Psychology Bulletin reports that college facebook users are actually less happy after logging in to facebook than before. They only see their friends’ highlights and successes, and this makes them feel worse about their own failures or struggles. Because micro-blogging is essentially predicated on voluntary self-disclosure, the inherent distortion of it is to make you look better than you really are. This false appearance means that when your friends scan your stuff, they see more of the good events (people don’t normally post on their fights, failures, and errors so much), which leads them to feel isolated in their own struggles and depressed in comparison with everyone else.

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Christian Post offers that this may even mean that churches which heavily use social networking may be leading their own congregants towards depression and isolation rather than into connecting more meaningfully with others. For my own part, I think the analysis is at least slightly flawed in that I’ve seen plenty of negative or depressed posts, and the reaction by others is always encouraging. But the other issue is whether this is really a unique phenomenon in social networking. We all smile at church, and we usually share more of our wins than our losses with each other anyhow. So it’s not obvious that facebook is doing much more than happens all the time.

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However, I do think there’s a different kind of frustration it can cause. First, it all comes and goes so quickly that the real lasting satisfaction of having played on facebook for half an hour is pretty slim. Second, when you post things and get little to no feedback (or at least less than you expect), that’s its own form of frustration. What’s worse, to have no medium for self-disclosure or to have one and get no reaction? But third, and this may only be my personal observation (I know I’m weird), but I find at least 90% of the actual content on people’s posts to be totally vapid. And this seems to be more true of the heaviest users. And so seeing so much activity be so torturously unstimulating leads to its own form of despair.