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Social Media Usage and the Level of Depressive Symptoms in the US [pdf]
- ChuckNorris89 6y agoBack when I was in school, if you weren't popular and wouldn't get invited to parties you wouldn't find out what you missed until the next day or after the weekend and by that time the whole FOMO would blow over but now thanks to the advent of always-online mobile devices and social media you get to watch your friends or colleagues Live, go on fancy trips and have fun without you, providing you with a constant source of FOMO. Same with online dating. If you were bad with the opposite sex you'd get rejected by the women in your circles, but at least you'd get a chance to talk and meet face-2-face and still stay in touch platonically later. Now you can get rejected, ghosted and stood up by thousands of other potential mates before they even meet you which must do wonders for your self esteem (/s). Same with finance. Some would make more $ than you but you wouldn't know about it. Now you can FOMO while you watch others making $$$ on trading platforms from their Cryptocurrency or TSLA stocks and feel left behind in the rat race. My $0.02
- madcow00 6y agoThis is so true. Similar is the case with professional social networking platforms like Linkedin. Back when I was in school, I could be content with being the topper of my class. But now, seeing all these people with similar background, doing better than me makes me so envious. Sometimes, I think to leave these platforms, but then these platoforms have been useful to me in keeping up to date with my field and in job hunting.
- bagacrap 6y agoOn the contrary, with online dating, I think people who are "bad at dating" have an advantage compared to old fashioned social circle dating. You get much more practice, ie opportunities to improve, and also many more chances to find someone who's a great match. When things go south you haven't made a friendship awkward, you just move on. If you don't look at bad dates as a learning opportunity, and instead allow yourself to blame factors outside of your control for causing your bad dates, you tread dangerously close to incel mentality.
- tortasaur 6y agoI'm not convinced that online dating is quite the effective learning environment you're making it out to be. You are much more disposable online, and people tend to have less empathy. If the only feedback you get is ghosting, then it could be something you said recently, the person could be busy, or perhaps a more attractive match came along. It's usually challenging to narrow it down if you aren't making the most basic mistakes. Some men bitterly turn misogynistic as a result of their failures, but that doesn't mean that their failures are entirely unique and personal.
- elorant 6y agoYou don't improve, you just fake it better. That's what most people do anyway. This is for me the most overlooked problem with privacy. If you have your life out in the open then everyone who has an interest in you can tell you the things you expect to hear without knowing whether they're genuine or just stalking you. It's much easier to flirt someone if you know what movies/music/books she likes, what bars/cafes she visits, what's her political view etc. And this creates a culture of vultures who fake their identities all the time. Furthermore, I implore anyone who thinks that online dating is easy to create a fake profile with a photo of a semi attractive woman as a test. You get flooded with thousands of requests in no time. I tried it on Facebook and I reached the 5.000 friends limit in just four days. There's no way anyone can reach out and flirt in this mess. You become irrelevant in the noise.
- idrios 6y agoSure you get more practice but what you're getting practice with is online dating, not dating in general. If you're a man who's not in top 10% of most desirable, it's a barren wasteland. Your best hope becomes to attempt to match with basically anyone, and even when you do match most won't respond. So maybe you tried to be witty the first several times and got no response or possibly unmatched. A lot of men will lose their wit after this and just start sending "Hey" in hopes of getting some kind of response. Meanwhile if you're a woman, nearly anyone who you click 'like' will be a match (except for the few you really want). The men you'll match with may not be charming because they've become tired or desperate or jaded, some may be outright rude, sexist, or cruel, and maybe the guy you want isn't responding at all -- because he's in that 10% of guys that all of the women are trying to match with and he's ignoring you. The upside of it being impersonal so you have more freedom to screw up without much effort or commitment is also it's downside, where the people you match with don't put much effort or commitment in for you either.
- blindm 6y agoThere is also the Freedom of Missing Out. What if you lived a life unconstrained by the various appointments we all have to make, a life where you're not obligated to go to parties, play the dating game, or buy the latest fast-fashion item of clothing?
- machello13 6y agoSome people want to go to parties and date the opposite sex because they enjoy those things, not because society is telling them to. Most people like being in relationships and hanging out with friends.
- OneGuy123 6y agoA guitar teacher told me the same things about guitar learners: Before people just learned some basic stuff and were happy. But nowadays they constantly compare themselves with thousands of youtubers guitarists who are very skilled and then always think that they themselves are shit compared to them.
- varrock 6y agoThis is true of the guitar, but even more dangerously true when it comes to fitness and body images.
- OneGuy123 6y agoYeah, fake natties all over the place. Sponsored by Gymshark and other supplement shops so they obviously cannot admit to using steroids etc... because they would lose the $$$ from sponsorhip asap.
- Rygian 6y agoJust a quick note of my thinking. You are calling it FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) but it's full-fledged MO, without the FO part.
- bagacrap 6y agocolloquially this is how the acronym is used though (doesn't have to make sense)
- mola 6y agoMissing out is not necessarily meaningful. FOMO is the anxiety caused by missing out. which may cause you more pain than actually missing out on that thing.
- dahart 6y agoAh this is a great point - worrying about something that could happen as opposed to worrying about something that did happen, but also leads me to the conclusion that the very idea of “missing out” is pure fear, a narrative about what other people are doing and the self-imposed expectation that you should be doing the same thing, right? Maybe there is no MO without FO?
- kordlessagain 6y agoEmotions just are. Thoughts come and go, but we may or may not pick the ones on which we loiter. If undesirable emotions ebe when we loiter on certain thoughts, repeated behaviors may emerge. Let's do this to get rid of that emotion, your brain might say to itself. Missing something, like your sunglasses, makes you wonder where they are, look for them, call people asking if you left them over, etc. This is worry, which is a light version of fear. "Missing out" isn't like looking your sunglasses but still makes you wonder if where you are isn't where you should be, which is still a type of anxious behavior which will lead to repetition if the emotional response is allowed to go on unchecked. Check out "Plutchik's wheel of emotions" for emotion groupings.
- Thlom 6y agoIf you choose to miss out then watching other people having fun on snapchat is no problem. The anxiety and/or depression kicks in when you see your friends or social group having fun together without you when you never were invited in the first place.
- o_class_star 6y agoEnvy is a negative-sum emotion. It's no fun to be envious, and while people think it must be enjoyable to be envied, it's really not. When you're aware of it at all, it's just uncomfortable. It's a shitty emotion on both sides, but it's great for capitalism. Comparing yourself against others is a loser's game. If the person is better, you lose. If the person comes out worse, you're taking a dip by comparing yourself at all to that person, so you still lose.
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- rmrfstar 6y agoAllowing your identity to be defined by other people is not healthy. You mention cryptocurrency, so I have to ask. Do you think Satoshi is sitting on a yacht tweeting out photographs of their fancy trips?
- rckoepke 6y agoDefinitely worth RTA before comment - at least skip to page 25 for the visual charts. It looks like social media usage may not correlate to depressive symptoms. Author's conclusion: > This paper finds that social media usage decreases the level of depressive symptoms employing a two-way fixed effects model. Direct information on people’s feelings about using social media also supports that using social media can be beneficial. This result implicates that society may have underestimated the importance and contribution of social media. There's a lot which can be discussed in terms of what is being measured in this study, and what else might make sense to measure. Or how this study's results compare against other similar studies.
- throwaway9980 6y agoI can only skim the article at the moment. At the risk of commenting without RTA: perhaps this is about how you use it? My wife uses Facebook for coordinating things in the community, coordinating kids play dates, and for just browsing very fluffy random bits of interestingness. She ruthlessly curates her feeds to remove anything political or generally negative. When I look at her feed it bears no resemblance to the toxic wasteland that I see in my feed. It reflects my usage, what engages me, even if it’s for the worse and leaves me feeling gross.
- nottorp 6y agoYep, on Facebook, unfollow is your best friend.
- sJ646U9k6c6gME9 6y agoWhen Trump announced his first campaign in the quaint old days in 2015, I began cleansing my Twitter feed of anyone who switched from nerd stuff to politics. After a couple of months I was left with no one to follow, so I left Twitter entirely. Good riddance!
- nottorp 6y agoHmm I don't unfollow for the occasional politics, but for mindless spam (which could be politics, but not necessarily). For example, I unfollowed someone who started to post photos of their every meal. And I unfollowed my own mother because she tends to repost every scare "chain letter" that comes across her :)
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- everdrive 6y agoBertrand Russell (obiviously) lived before social media, but he saw what the information age was doing to people. He didn't put it this way, but with enough information you can see your place on the bell curve. Now most people realize they are average, and not extraordinary at all. Even really smart people are still pretty close to the middle. Russell puts it better, of course: http://bactra.org/Russell/on_youthful_cynicism.html http://bactra.org/Russell/on_youthful_cynicism.html "Moreover many kinds of beauty require that a man should take himself more seriously than is possible for an intelligent modern. A prominent citizen in a small city State, such as Athens or Florence, could without difficulty feel himself important. The earth was the center of the Universe, man was the purpose of creation, his own city showed man at his best, and he himself was among the best of his own city. In such circumstances Æschylus or Dante could take his own joys or sorrows seriously. He could feel that the emotions of the individual matter, and that tragic occurrences deserve to be celebrated in immortal verse. But the modern man, when misfortune assails him, is conscious of himself as a unit in a statistical total; the past and the future stretch before him in a dreary procession of trivial defeats. Man himself appears as a somewhat ridiculous strutting animal, shouting and fussing during a brief interlude between infinite silences." Any certainly, man's place in the bell curve is not the only problem here, but it is a prominent one, and one that existed before social media, and is almost certainly aggravated by the other problems of social media.
- bagacrap 6y agoI don't understand. Athens man didn't understand he was going to die and be forgotten? Only modern man is aware that life is a "brief interlude"? (Not that I think everyone would agree with the infinite silence part.)
- everdrive 6y agoSenior (1), I can see your point. The stoics who lived well before Russell certainly did not put a lot of value in the emotions of the person. I'm paraphrasing quite badly here, but Marcus Aurelius said something to the effect of "everything that will happen has already happened, there is nothing special about me, and it's natural for me to die and be forgotten." I think Russell still paints a valid point, however you're right to think that perspectives were not uniform in the past, nor are they uniform now. I do believe, however, statistical awareness does add a bit more weight to Russell's perspective. (1) https://youtu.be/ZISMQ9O3EDQ?t=108 https://youtu.be/ZISMQ9O3EDQ?t=108
- alexpetralia 6y agoI would love to see the effect on Big 5 personality traits. I expect Neuroticism goes up substantially.
- croissants 6y agoNote that the conclusion here is not the typical one. From the abstract, emphasis mine: > I find that using Twitter decreases the level of depressive symptoms by 27%.
- reaperducer 6y agoMore and more I think the greatest good that can be done for global society is for someone to just kick the plug out of the wall at Twitter and Facebook. These aren't critical infrastructure. These aren't even remotely necessary services. They're the box of Sugar Coated Chocolate Bombs on the breakfast table of communications. They add no nutritional value to a person's day. They only exist to foster addiction to serve themselves.
- redisman 6y agoIt's one of those things where I don't know if the genie can be put back into the bottle. You could reset the clock I guess but it's a fairly easy service (in that there aren't many unknowns) to build back up by someone else with some VC money.
- GloriousKoji 6y agoAs much as I hate to say this but they are pseudo-critical infrastructure. In some parts of the world Facebook is synonymous with the internet. Here in California during the wildfires it was my experience that twitter gave better emergency notification, both from local municipalities and 'neighbors' than any other source. As terrible as modern social media culture is, there have been positive effects on the world. Lets not forget things like the Arab Spring which might have not been possible without twitter. Then again it helps all 'minorities' ranging from BLM to neo-nazis. I'm not sure if total net effect is positive.
- fendy3002 6y agoSome people use login with Facebook to authenticate their work / project / hobby sites. When you block them those will become unusable for some people.
- kordlessagain 6y ago> The empirical findings cannot provide more information on whether this term is positive or negative. There is also no theoretical reason if [complicated equation trying to quantify emotional responses] should be positive or negative. Therefore, it is possible that different studies find different correlations, and the true social media effect is negative. Why is it that humans think emotional output may quantified by observing sense information alone? It should be self evident that people who use social media "encode" emotional responses in their words, and some do it on purpose to "trigger" others who may not have defenses against the "fake emotional outrage" or other negative emotions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
- sloshnmosh 6y agoDo people that frequent tech sites such as HN really download documents posted on someone’s personal Google Drive? Facinating
- nbzso 6y agoMaking money by creating ways to make people feel miserable. This is social media effect in general. Most of decision making in social media companies is psychology based. Dark UX patterns are not made by designers, designers only implement. Zuckerberg - He studied psychology and computer science and belonged to Alpha Epsilon Pi and Kirkland House. Yes social media can be used as a channel for information, but only if individuals are aware of dangers ahead of time and most people aren't. In general: If you consider yourself "Smart and Educated" in 2020 you don't use social media. Period. Online dating? It's suicide and can distort your self perception to unbelievable falsehoods.