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Is Facebook making us sad?
By Rosie Perera | February 3, 2011 at 6:15 pm
Slate recently published an article by Libby Copeland entitled “Anti-Social Network: By helping other people look happy, Facebook is making us sad.”
I am not so sure. In my experience, there is a lot of variability among people as to how honest they will be on Facebook about how their life is really going. Plenty of my friends post status updates when they are unhappy about something or just generally having a crummy day. It is possibly a self-selecting phenomenon. I’m more likely to be friends in real life with people who are honest about their emotions, and those types of people tend to be more honest online as well. The study reported in that article did not look at Facebook explicitly, and it dealt exclusively with college students, who might be at a stage in life where it’s more important to impress your online friends with how much fun you’re having than to be real with them. So I’d take the sweeping conclusions the author draws with a grain of salt. Nonetheless I was glad for her recommendation of Sherry Turkle’s new book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. I have great respect for her work and have added this to my list of books I want to read.
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