Slashdot Mirror
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!
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!
Everyone goes through the phase where one learns (or not) the difference between persistent public communication, and forgetful (I'm glad you used this term) communication.
IRC is forgetful
Telnet chats are forgetful
IMs and VOIP can be forgetful, depending on the service.
The caveat is that everything that is over the internet can be logged by one of the participating parties, but in general, the default is no logging for these services.
Everything that is a modern version of email, usenet, and BBSes are not forgetful. The default is that everything is a "permanent." It was laughable that people got their panties in a twist when DejaNews suddenly showed up - as if nobody ever saved usenet posts for fun and profit before DejaNews existed. The hand-wringing over FB and other persistent communication is just more of the same.
The people who can't distinguish between these services are the ones who have a problem.
I have the advantage in that I learned this shit back in the 80s.
>IRL
Wait... wait... with the availability of cameras everywhere, even embedded into eyeglasses with direct upload to Internet services, I have to say that your assumed "forgetful" drunken conversation down at the pub about how you lust after Justin Bieber, after ten gin gimlets, is going to be archived for fun and profit, for all posterity.
--
BMO
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.
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...
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'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.
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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.
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.