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Emotional Contagion Spread Through Facebook
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.
Turn them off,
Tune them out.
Stay sane.
So given that I post lots of stuff but do not read stuff in the feed, that means I am the sole originator of lots of contagions?
Kindof badass.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Facebook? Isn't that where the police keep all the mug shots?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
There was an incredibly depressing book I once read that talked about something very similar, except it was a social contagion that caused hive-mind behavior (the book called it "the meme"), and the only way to "cure" it was to erase every memory the person had formed since being exposed to the meme
In the book, the entire earth is "infected" with it, and the only non-memed people lived on an isolated moon base (which is where the book takes place)
I tried to find the author or the name of the book on Google, but had no luck
'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.
So the "Empathy Box" from "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" is real? And now?
Um...is anyone on Slashdot still on Facebook?
Yes.
I enjoy the occasional updates from people I can no longer meet daily, as well as some insight into the current day-to-day affairs of my home country. I don't post often, but when I do have something to say, normally several people show interest.
Facebook is no longer an unfiltered pile of Farmville requests. Especially if you take the time just once to mark your close friends and to unfollow the obsessive narcissists. Its ranking and personalization algorithms also help.
Also, it is often the easiest way to contact a person when you don't have their email or phone number ready.
26 year old here. No facebook for 3 years.
Though, I'll admit that I am not the average consumer.
Sounds like they discovered how cultures are developed, maintained, and grow. Next up they may study how social bonds are formed and maintained, perhaps they'll call it "friendship", but more likely they'll refer to it as some sort of "preferential social virus reinforcement."
You're a "planner" type of person and you don't have contact information for people in your circle?
I would wager the effect noted in the study has a mode somewhere below age 22. Given the adolescent search for identity, the typical middle/high school - even college - is basically an emotional tuberculosis ward. You know, the old kind where they would try anything - open windows, giant bowls of ice and fans - to try and cool things off and stem the epidemic. Most of which doesn't work. What does work is making their media experience symmetric for consumption and production. Give them a way to express themselves in original work and you'd be stunned by the diversity of thought. Their technology of choice - mobile devices - is still heavily weighted towards content consumption. The ability to "share" - the only real innovation in the recent past - does not make them true producers, but mostly reflectors. Better and more accessible content creation on popular devices is the key. Yes, they will first mimic what they've seen in media - their spin on some favorite story - but that will be dropped after a while - and is really no different from what the pros do - the vast majority of noob filmmakers and writers are doing their spin on a genre or the dreaded mashup pitch "it's The Godfather meets Armageddon!" and then they need a second thing to do and originality rears its hydra-like heads.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" back in 1976... it describes exactly the same fracking concept.
Is this not the same thing as fashion? Why is anyone surprised by the same effect, just because it's online?