Slashdot Mirror
Number of Facebook Friends Linked To Anxiety
Hugh Pickens writes writes "WebProNews reports that according to a new survey, the more Facebook friends you have, the more likely you are to feel stressed out by the site. 'The results threw up a number of paradoxes,' says Dr Kathy Charles, who led the study. 'For instance, although there is great pressure to be on Facebook there is also considerable ambivalence amongst users about its benefits.' Causes of stress included deleting unwanted contacts, the pressure to be entertaining, and having to use appropriate etiquette for different types of friends. 'Like gambling, Facebook keeps users in a neurotic limbo, not knowing whether they should hang on in there just in case they miss out on something good.'"
Information overload and a vague sense of ill-defined obligation leads to stress...
Really, any reason this is surprising?
Does having a witty signature really indicate normality?
"Facebook keeps users in a neurotic limbo, not knowing whether they should hang on in there just in case they miss out on something good"
Just like slashdot. Been here for years and I'm still waiting ;)
Cheers, Chris
I dont find the amount of FB friends I have stressful, nor do I find deleting any of them stressful. I think people need to start reconnecting with the real world if they suffer stress from such things. Then again, the real world is a lot more stressful... maybe they should keep wasting their time on FB worrying about such "stressful" things - it's a lot less stress than the real world nowadays.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
if you do something a lot, it may start to feel like a burden, and it's likely to generate stress
The moral of this story is - friends on Facebook shouldn't be professional relationships. That's what LinkedIn is for, if you must.
[17] Leary, T., White, C., Wood, P. R., Bhabha, W. D., and Wirth, N. Lambda calculus considered harmful. In Proceedings
but I really don't see the value in studying how people use facebook.
Its an experiment in behavioral psychology. One where the rat gets a shock no matter which lever it presses.
Have gnu, will travel.
I generally support just about any kind of scientific work, but I really don't see the value in studying how people use facebook. We all know it is for the most part a tremendous waste of time; I'm not sure what we have to gain by looking into how people use it.
I don't know if I'd say that. I have a lot of FB friends, about 80-90% of whom I've met in person at one point or another (I travel a lot and meet a lot of people, plus former classmates and colleagues, and people I'm attempting to connect with for the first time that I *should* know... Alumni from a group that I'm the Alumni outreach coordinator for).
Facebook in particular, and social networking in general, is the most efficient way known to man to maintain contact and a semblance of a relationship to a large number of people at once in a back-and-forth, interactive manner.
It's a time-waster if you sit there and just play social network games on it (Skinner Boxes). For the most part, I don't. I'm keeping up with the feed, commenting, liking, sharing, and re-posting. (It also helps that I have a job where I can keep a FB window open all day in-between other activities.
Maybe I just have more interesting friends than you? Or would otherwise work harder at keeping up with them? Don't know... But FB isn't a "tremendous waste of time" for me.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
I have zero Facebook friends and zero stress about it. QED
Fortunately, for me, I've never bought into the whole idea of "social networks", and here's why: I don't view them as anything useful to me, as they exist now. Facebook, MySpace, etc.? Just an attempt to monetize the 'net, in the guise of making interpersonal communications "easy". And that's OK, for those of my friends that deem it useful, etc. But, I'm not buying into it, ever. Me? I'm an "old fart" - when a friend asks me to join them on such, my reply is this: "You have my personal email address, which I only give to friends. You have, in addition, my home phone number, my personal cell phone number as well. These suffice for you to contact me, whenever you wish, knowing that I WILL respond to them, because you are my friend. I have no need, nor desire, to publish the details of my life on sites that will only abuse such, nor do I wish to follow your life in excruciating detail on such beyond our interactions. It's not that I don't care, mind you, it's only that, as a friend of yours, I think I'm entitled to learn things affecting your life, your real life, in something more than posts, etc., but, I refuse to let social networks replace real life communication with my friends, as it appears to me that is
A lot of the people on facebook are there trying to promote some business or other. The sad part is, if you add up all the time invested, you see that the return is ALWAYS negative. Unless you already have a brand, you're not going to "create a brand" on facebook. So you have all these self-proclaimed "social media gurus" generally claiming that they can "promote your brand", and people buy into it because, just like individuals, they're afraid that if they don't, they'll miss something. "Everyone else is doing it, so it must be working for them ..."
Of course, the only thing they're missing is that It's all thin gruel.
If you're a business, you WANT your competitors to be investing time and energy in facebook. Not only does it make it easy to "stalk" your competition, but the time and money they're wasting there are resources diverted from elsewhere.
The study does not establish causation, it finds a correlation. Without a control group it is not possible to make the conclusions stated in the article. The hypothesis is stated as a conclusion. Interesting, but flawed.
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