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Why Facebook Is Stressing You Out
Hugh Pickens writes "Megan Garber reports that the more friends you have on Facebook — or, perhaps more accurately, the more 'friends' you have on Facebook — the more stressed you're likely to be about actually having them. The wider your Facebook network, the more likely it is that something you say or do on the site will end up offending one of that network's members. The stress comes from the kind of personal versioning that is common in analog life — the fact that you (probably) behave slightly differently when you're with your mom than you do when you're with your boss, or with your boyfriend, or with your dentist. A study of over 300 Facebook users found that on average people are Facebook friends with seven different social circles. The most common group was friends who were known from offline environments (97 percent added them as friends online), followed by extended family (81 percent), siblings (80 percent), friends of friends (69 percent), and colleagues (65 percent). Those are, in the sociological sense, very different groups — groups that carry different (and unspoken-because-obvious) behavioral expectations. Per the study's survey, 'adding employers or parents resulted in the greatest increase in anxiety.'"
This makes a ton of sense. There is a natural urge to share the things you care about deeply. Whether you are passionate about the environment, religion's role in society, or a particular conflict - you are bound to have friends who disagree with you. Sometimes passionately. At the same time there is a palpable pressure not to be political on Facebook. So when you (or a friend) posts something polarizing, the attention it gets (or doesn't get) can really stress you out.
Its a shame, especially since political discourse is so very essential to a healthy society - that social sites like Facebook make it even more stressful than it already can be.
Did this about a year ago, dropped all friends except for a "close" 30 or so; my immediate neighbors, some close friends throughout the years, and family. No coworkers, no friends of friends, no one from HS or college or grad school.
;)
The great thing about growing older is that it no longer stresses me out when my parents find out I'm smoking pot with the neighbors.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
You just stop giving a fuck about what people think of you?
I find it's a lot easier to be myself when I maintain an internal locus of identity. If people don't like or at least respect who I am and what I say, why do I count them as my friend? Differences within a social circle can be healthy and rewarding. Altering your behavior to conform to a social precedent is not.
When my parents added me as friends, my facebook usage dropped from 2-3 hrs/wk to 10 minutes/wk. Actually lessened my anxiety and freed up my time!
... and I'm not stressed about it at all. Huh. My anecdote IS the singular of data!
If Facebook didn't exist, I wouldn't be stressed about it at all. Instead, we get all these stupid stories about this website and stuff. That stresses the shit out of me. The fact that people think I should be using this privacy sucking tool of evil also stresses me. But having friends on that website? Well, I don't use it, so that doesn't stress me.
Also, this is something that people on /. have been saying for ages. It's one of the reasons that Google Plus is meant to be wonderful. (I wouldn't know, I don't use it either.) Being able to separate work friends from pub friends from high school friends from family seems like a pretty obvious requirement.
The idea of forgetfulness is another thing. If I say something stupid down at the pub, my workmates aren't likely to find out about it. The other patrons of the pub are likely to forget about it before too long as well (unless it was particularly stupid). But on the Internet...
Gee, anyone else have any obvious differences between the Internet and RL?
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
I tend to just say whatever I want and let people delete me if needed. I probably don't need to be friends with all my aunts and 8yo cousins. When some debate arises, I don't mind; I just win. All the work friends probably keep me from posting too many pot legalization videos and such, but that's what Tumblr is for.
This is exactly why Google+ has a feature called circles. Given the audience here i'm sure I don't have to go into details.
Unfortunately tho, Google+ hasn't really caught on outside some specific groups such as photographers. As well, while the tech savvy have no issues migrating to yet another social network, the problem is your not going to get most of your 'friends' and family to do so. I'm lucky my mom is on facebook, let alone trying to get her to move to Google+.
Since I live away from most of my family I use facebook to upload pictures of the kids, keep in touch etc. So as long as even a few of them stay on facebook then i'm not going anywhere anytime soon.
So given that, I basically treat facebook as a public bulletin board. I don't say or post anything there that I would be ashamed of saying in front of my mom or boss.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
GEORGE: Ah you have no idea of the magnitude of this thing. If she is allowed to infiltrate this world, then George Costanza as you know him, ceases to exist! You see, right now, I have Relationship George, but there is also Independent George. That's the George you know, the George you grew up with -- Movie George, Coffee shop George, Liar George, Bawdy George.
JERRY: I, I love that George.
GEORGE: Me Too! And he's dying Jerry! If Relationship George walks through this door, he will kill Independent George! A George, divided against itself, cannot stand!
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Given the history of usenet negative and troll postings as a rule of thumb... its the lack of a dislike and a "fuck you" button that causes peoples frustration to build up inside... (no vent release)...
I mean geeze, it takes less than 60 seconds to find three references that the "carjacker leaves leaflet on your back window" thing is a hoax, or that quote from Thomas Jefferson was four words taken out of context in a passage that means the exact opposite. But people whine "it's too hard to check and if it helps just one person it's worth hitting 'Share'". No, it really isn't. Snopes. Learn it, use it, live it.
Every once in awhile I post a picture of an open front door with "Hit 'Share' if you know what this is and how to use it". Yeap, you're right, I'm not terribly popular with some types of people.
I think there are people who are stressed, and people who cause stress. I'm proud to be one of the latter category. :-)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Here you go:
http://www.prochoiceviolence.com/index-of-criminal-activity
My wife has an FB account and all they do is post bizarre stuff on her wall and make her feel uncomfortable. I cannot imagine why anyone would want anything to do with FB.
Some of us don't have your wife on Facebook...
Today, I was reminded about an invitation I'd received to a birthday party (the host noticed I hadn't responded), and after an enquiry from another invitee a couple of people have organised sharing a car to the house.
Some friends are tracking how many hits their parody of Gangnam Style has (23,064 so far).
A few others are debating the quality of the evidence for putting a minimum price on alcoholic drinks in England and Wales.
My own profile doesn't have much recent activity: just a couple of "check-ins" from friends who were at the same places I was at, and me saying which party I'm going to on New Year's Eve.
It's hardly critical stuff, and apart from the useful way to manage events I wouldn't really miss it if it went, but that doesn't make it useless or pointless.
I solved those issues long ago by behaving in the same way for all social circles. I've set for myself what I think are acceptable and honorable behavior patterns and abide by them always. Take it, or just leave me alone, it's that simple. That includes my friends, co-workers, parents, and just about anyone I know. It means I have to restrict myself a bit, but it also means I'm essentially a better person.
PS: yes, some persons don't like it, but they are a tiny minority.
You cannot proceed from the informal to formal by formal means
The people who aggravate me the most are the ones who assume that being on "the wrong side" is evil, stupid or backward. Not just one side either and they are easy to spot by the way they spout off about "right wingers" , "repugnicans", "CONservatives" or the opposite site: "liberals", "LIEberals", "communists" etc. In general an extreme view from the wingnuts on both sides that fail to understand that it's possible for two people to both be honest people who love their country while having differing views on how that's done.
Each side has valid points and restricting one's life exclusively to one side without considering the alternative is a recipe for disaster.
Highlights from: http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/01/water-water-everywhere-nor-any-drop-to.html ... ... The second reason for quitting Facebook was that I didn't want to know everything it told me. (You know that joke, "That was more than I needed to know!") People tell different people different things. They present different faces to different people. Facebook may have started with one face (college classmates), but now it mixes faces together, or at least it does if people are not scrupulous about setting up separate lists (and most aren't). Within minutes of starting to use Facebook I was seeing things relatives and friends said to their friends and relatives, things that I would never have known they said, things I didn't like, things that made me feel sad to find out that we have so little in common and disagree about so much. You could argue that I should revel in the transparency and argue with people and learn about them and wade deep into the mayhem, but hey - this is the real social world we are talking about, not a game. Some arguments can never be won, and the stakes are high, and I have better things to do with my time. ... ..."
"There were three essential reasons I left Facebook after only a short time. First, the privacy issue was big. To begin with, I set up separate accounts for my work and personal selves, which I've read is something many businesspeople are doing. I managed it, but it was an uneasy start, and later I found myself going back to my privacy settings often to check and recheck that I had things properly set. The kerfuffle that happened a few weeks ago where you couldn't log on without being pestered to reduce your privacy was reminiscent of the guilty-until-proven-innocent feeling of just having bought a Microsoft product.
Nobody has only one face
The third thing about Facebook is, it sets you up for an obligatory time drain. It is so easy to "friend" somebody you barely know that you end up with social obligations that don't match the relationships. Putting my father in the same list as a guy I barely remember from high school just doesn't make sense. The obligations I feel towards those two people differ by orders of magnitude, but in Facebook it all looks the same. (No offense to that guy - See? I just felt a social obligation to say that!) I found myself feeling socially obligated to review and comment on things people I've never met have been doing, and I perused picture after picture trying to figure out if I knew any of the people in them. I only got up to 25 "friends" so I can see how this sort of thing could take up huge amounts of time. The social obligation to say something, anything, is overpowering.
Google Groups solves some of this, but not all.
Disclaimer: She has ideas for something called Rakontu she feels would be better:
http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/08/steal-these-ideas.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Mark has famously said that wanting to have multiple identities constitutes a "lack of integrity."
Apparently, to the people running Facebook, you're not allowed to discuss different topics or to use different language with different people. After all, in real life you always talk the same way to the old ladies at church as to the guys at the bar, right? And the same way to your coworkers and boss as to your close friends, right? And the same to your parents as to your spouse in the bedroom, right?
Of course, the reality of this is that Facebook doesn't give a crap about users. They just want to make money off of you. And the more interactions they can track, the more they know about everyone. That's why every so often they seem to expand the default privacy settings to make your information ever more widely available. Every time you "like" a comment, follow a link on your friend's post, etc., that's another datapoint.
But if you restrict most of your posts to only a small group, that's fewer potential datapoints. Not good business for Facebook, who wants to sell your interactions to the highest bidder. If they made it ridiculously easy to have multiple identities or groups so you could interact like everyone does in real life, you're only going to share posts with people you think will already like it. And that's something Facebook probably knows already. They're more interested in making interconnections that could tell more about people than the obvious ones... so they force you to cast the net wider.
I was on facebook... and had several "incidents" Finally, this hippy friend of my wife started doing this psychedelic artwork that she was making prints of and selling on some art website. Don't get me wrong, she was really talented, and the art was pretty good. But she's a hippie and a pothead, so when she posted a particularly ridiculous 60's looking psychedelic painting and linked it on facebook, I went to the site, took the imagine, Photoshopped a pot leaf into the middle of it and re-posted it with "There, I fixed it for you." She replied "You're a jerk" Which could have been mad... could have been funny... hard to tell on facebook but oh-well.
Well, it didn't end there. You see, in order to up the photo, for some reason I had to host it online. I can't remember why... anyways, so I just used the same art print auction site that she did. Well, my version of her print skyrocketed on the sites charts in a matter of a day or 2. I hadn't expected that at all, and wasn't really sure what to do. So I sent her the credentials to the bogus account I had made and told her to take it over so she could get all the proceeds. I didn't want to me making money off a joke version of her art. SHE DID NOT TAKE IT WELL. To say the least. I thought the money would have made her happy, but you'd think I'd killed her puppy.
I no longer use facebook. After about 6 months she finally was willing to come to our house again, walked in the door and said "We shall never speak of it again" and we didn't. I wonder how much money it made her...
Also, if you don't want to get fat, don't eat;
and if you don't want to get social diseases, don't have sex.
See? Real easy!
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
I only counted five in the summary. Heres the full list of the 7 Circles of Facebook Hell:
1. Friends who were known from offline environments
2. Extended family
3. Siblings
4. Friends of friends
5. Colleagues
6. Corporations like Zynga you've given access to your data (unwittingly or otherwise)
7. Corporations Facebook has given access to your data
I said almost the same thing recently, in another venue. I disagree with almost everything the liberals are up in arms about. Does that make them all evil bastards? No - just a bunch of doofuses with whom I disagree. Ditto with the "conservatives". Are they evil, because of their opinions? Again, no - just another bunch of doofuses with whom I disagree.
During the recent campaigns, both sides more or less said that if the other side won, it would spell doom for the United States.
I DO happen to think there are some evil bastards on both sides. The most recent evil bastard in the news is Norquist. Anyone who meticulously signs up potential office holders to pledge their votes, in exchange for campaign backing and funds is evil.
The problem is, why do hundreds of thousands of people support Norquist? The man is manipulating their elected representatives. If there is merit to Norquist's position, then a lot of those representatives will vote that way anyway. If Norquist's position is without merit, then representatives should be free to vote against it, without repercussion.
Politics is a dirty business, and it looks to me like Norquist is the source of a lot of the dirt.
Don't mean to pick on Conservatives only - the Dems have their own dirt balls. Ted Kennedy, for instance. I breathed a sigh of relief that he will never sit in Washington again.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I'm in the same boat. I'm pro-choice, and I don't care about marriage one way or the other (really, I think adults should just be left to make whatever contracts they want with each other). I want the US to have the strongest military in the world (I served in it), but I don't think we need to truck it all over the place, fighting other people's fights. I think we should help poor people, but I think that our definition of "poor" is not precise and our implementation is faulty, so we end up spending hundreds of billions on the wrong people - I think we spent close to a trillion dollars in 2011 on means-tested benefits - while some people are still having to skip meals. I firmly believe we can do a better job helping the truly needy, while spending a lot less.
.
I want us to be fiscally responsible - maybe deficit spending works to stimulate the economy, and maybe it doesn't; I lean towards the opinion that economic activity is a chaotically complex system and we're kidding ourselves if we think we know with certainty what levers to pull, and what the second and third-order effects will be. But no matter what, at some point we have to pay back this massive chunk of debt, and we can't ignore it and hope that "growth" will save us. I could go on...
Maybe it's that we all feel the need to defend the party we vote for, and to tear down the opposition (whether it's just one party, or multiple). To paraphrase Tyler Durden, you are not the party you voted for. Maybe we all just need to step back and form some opinions of our own that may or may not perfectly align with a particular ideology or party platform.
Um this is Slashdot. Quotes typically delimit a string literal, so why would you put the comma inside? You're bitching up the wrong tree here.
not everyone lives in the US. and some people may even have friends who happen to live in other countries than they themselves do.
So what?
How does that justify handing over your entire privacy?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
To be fair, he could have been saying he wanted a balanced budget but doesn't mind social things that fall left on the specrum.
So true. I'm very complicated with my views. I'm a fiscal centrist, personal conservative but a social libertarian.
Translated: I think the government should balance its budget but still have enough revenue to cover things like health care and social assistance for people who fall on hard times but nudge people out of the social assistance nest (don't pay people to be high school dropouts for the rest of their lives). For my personal life I'm conservative but I don't see where that gets me the right to tell anyone else how to live theirs so drink, smoke, snort, inject whatever you want and marry who you want(as long as your honest about it) but don't expect me to join you and I'm fine with it.
The upshot is that I know a few people who agree with me but the vast majority of people on both sides get pissed off at me a lot although it has led to some amusing incidents involving people being shocked that I'm not going to preach at them about their lifestyles.
The ads pay for the development of meaningful web content.
And yet there is no correlation between the presence of advertisements, and the quality of the content. There must be something wrong with your argument.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"