Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Emotional Contagion Spread Through Facebook

Posted by Soulskill on from the your-opinions-are-my-opinions dept.

Daniel_Stuckey sends this quote from Motherboard: It hopefully doesn't come as a surprise that your friends shape who you are. But we tend to think of that on a micro level: If your close circle of friends tends to have tattoos, wear polo shirts, or say "chill" a lot, it's quite possible that you'll emulate them over time — and they'll emulate you too. But what happens on a macro scale, when your friend circle doesn't just include the dozen people you actually hang out with regularly, but also the hundreds or thousands of acquaintances you have online? All of those feeds may seem filled with frivolities from random people (and they are!) but that steady stream of life updates — photos, rants, slang — are probably shaping you more than you think. A massive Facebook study recently published in PNAS found solid evidence of so-called emotional contagion—emotional states spreading socially, like a virus made of emoji—on the social network.

7 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Turn off, tune out. by pubwvj · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Turn them off,
    Tune them out.
    Stay sane.

    1. Re:Turn off, tune out. by Beck_Neard · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yup. By the way, since this is bound to crop up: this doesn't mean "don't be social." You can be a perfectly healthy social human being without broadcasting your photos and your every emotion to the world. You can also have a facebook account and still stay sane: just restrict your use of the site to 1/2 times a week.

      --
      A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
    2. Re:Turn off, tune out. by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 4, Insightful

      About a year ago, keeping up with FB started to seem like a bit of a job, ain't nobody paying me to do it, and it has seldom if ever proved all that helpful or useful in ways that couldn't be accomplished via other, less intrusive, less annoying ways.

      Those "You have 532 messages" messages keep piling up in my Some Rainy Day... mail folder, and I keep finding other things to do than to log in to read them.

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    3. Re:Turn off, tune out. by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Unfortunately, this doesn't work. Today's under 25 crowd thinks failure to have a facebook account is automatically suspicious. What are you trying to hide? If you're not proud of broadcasting your life, then either you have a pathetic life you should be embarrassed of, or you're some kind of deviant or criminal. Law enforcement thinks so, too.

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    4. Re:Turn off, tune out. by epyT-R · · Score: 5, Insightful

      and so therefore? what? we should all rush out and get accounts so that teenagers won't think we are losers? ..so that the cops won't SWAT our dogs for traffic violations? I see little reason to appease today's generation's acceptance of the police state mentality.

      You let teenagers dictate your life parameters?

    5. Re:Turn off, tune out. by Jarik+C-Bol · · Score: 3, Insightful

      What are you trying to hide?

      Everything. Nothing I do is anyone else's business, unless I deem it so.

      --
      I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
  2. parasitical by epyT-R · · Score: 5, Insightful

    'social' media is a parasitical emergent phenomenon. It requires people to compusively use it in order to maintain itself, and it does this by triggering the reward system for social interaction while it is really anything but social. Even IRC is more social than facebook. The only winning move is not to play.

    The fact that it enables trends which normally scale to one circle of friends to go global is not a surprise.