Jealous of Facebook?

I remember the first time I used Facebook. Within a matter of 6 months, almost everyone I knew had portrayed the digital version of themselves on this nifty little website. I could connect with my friends on a different level; I could see everything that was none of my business. In turn, my friends were able to see everything I posted, weather I wanted everything to be seen or not. This lead me to create what I like to call the “highlight reel” of my life, where I only posted what I was willing to have everyone see. It’s not that Facebook became a false reality, it was just a selective reality displaying the “me” that I wanted people to see. It’s pretty easy to see the ethical dishonesty here, but what's harder to recognize is the effect this can have on spectators. Recent psychological research is beginning to show that using social networking sites like Facebook can actually cause jealousy or stress thanks to little “highlight reels” like mine.

People are overestimating the happiness of their friends. Alex Jordan, a Ph.D. student at Stanford lead a research paper in the January issue ofPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin which studied people’s reaction to Facebook profiles. Jordan asked the 80 freshman’s about their friends and recent events. The study showed that these students were unable to account the negative events in their peers lives. The arguments here is that people naturally want to be happier then their peers, so when we have fabricated images of our peers, it becomes increasingly unrealistic to reach this goal. In other words, seeing our friend’s have fun on facebook, makes us jelous in real life. Another study lead by psychologists at Edinburgh Napier University analyzed how Facebook causes stress. They surveyed 200 students and found that they were often stressed by turning down friend requests, deleting unwanted contacts, and the pressure to be entertaining. Looking at these studies, I question if Facebook is the social saviour I originally thought it to be.

Now, it’s a little unfair to look at a few studies that show the negative effects of Facebook and label it as evil; if that were the case, I could probably prove anything to be evil. The question is weather the negatives outweigh the positives. Unfortunately, it’s a little tough to practically answer this question, but it should be questioned weather Facebook is necessary to our lives. Were our lives really that bad before these websites took over our social lives? As for me, my account has been deactivated for almost 2 years now, and I don’t plan on reactivating it without a practical purpose.

Here are the some reference to my sources:
Misery Has More Company Than People Think
Dies Facebook Stress You Out?

Here are some other sources I found interesting:
How Facebook Breeds Jelousy
Jelous Much? MySpace, Facebook Can Spark It