Slashdot Mirror
Study: Social Networks Have Negative Effect On Individual Welfare
An anonymous reader writes: A study of 50,000 people in Italy has found the impact of social networking on individual welfare to be "significantly negative." The researchers found that improvements in self-reported well-being occurred when online networking led to face-to-face interactions, but this effect was overwhelmed by the perceived losses in well-being (PDF) generated by interaction strictly through social networks. The researchers "highlight the role of discrimination and hate speech on social media which they say play a significant role in trust and well-being. Better moderation could significantly improve the well-being of the people who use social networks, they conclude."
Bail! Bail!
I always thought social media like Facebook and Twitter made people narcissists or made their narcissism worse. People always looks online and compare their lives to others and become depressed.
People think I'm anti-social becoz I have no Facebook, Twitter, I don't text, etc. I don't use supermarket loyalty cards which are sold to companies like insurance companies, which then jack up your rates.
I could see this being very plausible for someone that suffers from depression. Seeing other people happy could potentially adversely effect someone that is clinically depressed .
Well, that explains a lot.
Nobody ever talks to anyone anymore. People don't learn to respect and value each other in the real world without face time in the real world. Trust me, as someone who never engages in conversation with people, I'm thoroughly convinced that all people are complete shit!
FTFA:
They found for example that face-to-face interactions and the trust people place in one another are strongly correlated with well-being in a positive way. In other words, if you tend to trust people and have lots of face-to-face interactions, you will probably assess your well-being more highly.
I think a lot of this has to do with Mirror Neurons.
I myself feel quite lonely if I am stuck with just online communication. And a lot of weight control and substance abuse programs strongly discourage all internet usage and in some case prohibit it - because face to face contact is extremely important for humans and all primates for that matter.
We need other people for emotional regulation. Hang out with calm easy going people, you become calmer. Hang out with angry crazies, you become angrier and crazier. Of course, it's not obsolute. Just because you hange out with Hitler, Jr. doesn't mean you're going to be just like him - but you will start picking up on his traits.
Call me cynical, but I just don't see Facebook adopting a sane moderation system, like for example anything that approximates slashcode.
Their equivalent of "moderation" would better resemble censorship. They would simply hide the thoughts and comments they don't think you would like. Of course, it would be for your own good...
Moderation censors opinions contrary to the majority of the participants in a particular forum. This frustrates those who need to communicate critical points, which will produce an entirely new set of negative feelings and may even break the behavioral hooks that make social networking appealing.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
How many facebook posts are "I think I married the wrong person," or "my IBS kept me up all night, couldn't stop shitting" ? It's a pathetic, edited version of people's lives that is sanitized, cherry-picked, and often outright fraudulent.
I did the facebook thing for a year, realized what it was, and never looked back. So glad I have not wasted another hour getting sucked into that artifice.
Jail time censors opinions contrary to the majority of the participants in a particular society. This frustrates those who need to communicate critical points, which will produce an entirely new set of negative feelings and may even break the behavioral hooks that make society appealing.
I wonder why freedom of speech was invented?
Call me cynical, but I just don't see Facebook adopting a sane moderation system, like for example anything that approximates slashcode.
Their equivalent of "moderation" would better resemble censorship. They would simply hide the thoughts and comments they don't think you would like. Of course, it would be for your own good...
No, they mean moderation.
Censorship is the suppression of speech. For example: "You can't talk about Oranges, they are evil!"
Moderation is the regulation of speech: "You can talk about Oranges, just not here. Go over there to talk about Oranges."
Freedom of speech means you have the right to say what you want, But I have and equal right to throw you out of my house if I don't like what you have to say. You seem to want the right to force me to listen to you, and that's just as bad as any form of censorship.
Because they have known for a long time that without the face-to-face interaction, their social network would collapse. They have been running experiments on people for a while now. This study is nothing new to them. Virtual hangouts will be their fix.
There's also this dying art called self-moderation that would make forced moderation or censorship unnecessary. Too much to ask that humans rediscover that ethic, I guess.
Maybe they meant self-moderation?
... and I don't even use it.
Actually my ultimate fear in this scenario has nothing to do with what I can "force people to listen to" as you put it. It has everything to do with what Facebook might decide we shouldn't hear.
And, who knows, maybe Facebook actually is capable and willing to implementing a sane, thoughtful moderation system. I just don't have faith that they ever will.
OTOH, I wouldn't doubt for a second that they prioritized items in your newsfeed based on who paid them advertising dollars. And in the same vein, I wouldn't doubt if they used a fancy new "moderation" system to simply block content they didn't want their users to see.
Call me cynical, but I just don't see Facebook adopting a sane moderation system, like for example anything that approximates slashcode. Their equivalent of "moderation" would better resemble censorship. They would simply hide the thoughts and comments they don't think you would like. Of course, it would be for your own good...
It's likely that a portion of the story is something that we also see here on /.: None of them really support anything that might be called a true "discussion". The reason both here and FB and the other "social media" is the approach of having a running string of "latest" topics, which quickly scroll off the bottom and out of sight. If you don't happen to see a thread in the first hour or so, you generally won't ever see it, and won't contribute to it. So, except for a few rabid topics like religion or partisan politics, where a small group can have fun running it out to thousands of rephrasings of each person's personal views, most discussion threads are typically shallow, and peter out at a depth in the single digits.
I've talked to a number of people here who express disappointment at how shallow the /. discussions usually are. They start of hoping to find in-depth analyses that point them to information that they hadn't run across or noticed. But they're disappointed with most of the threads, which only repeat a few things that those familiar with the topic already know, and then the threads just stop.
FB is quite a lot worse this way than /., of course. I've been on it for some years, and I've never noticed a "discussion" that got to depth greater than 3. I'm sure they exist; I've just never seen them. And a lot of my friends are quite well-informed "geeks" who in person can engage in long discussions. Why don't they do this on FB? Well, they may try, but quickly learn that few people ever read, much less reply to, their comments. Over here, we do sometimes get a bit deeper than that, and I've seen a lot of good information here at depth 5 or 6. But still, that's not very deep as discussions go.
I've seen much better (i.e., deeper and more informative) discussions on nearly every mailing list I've been on. If you want actual informative, socially interactive discussions, that's a noticeably better model for a forum's structure.
But the "social media" is primarily just an electronic form of the old "see and be seen" sort of social event. Such things have always been known as shallow and uninformative, although they can be fun if populated by the right crowd.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
It has nothing to do with moderation anyway. People on social networks barely interact with each other, they're reading about others like in news feeds, and they don't really do anything together. It's kind of obvious that things like (random examples) playing in a band, having a barbecue, watching a movie with friends or doing wild river rafting tend to make most people more happy than browsing web pages all day.
Moderation is the regulation of speech: "You can talk about Oranges, just not here. Go over there to talk about Oranges."
It becomes censorship when the moderation authority continues: "You can't talk about over there, it is evil!"
This was a study on Italians. It also smells suspiciously like the old "games cause violence", "comics cause moral decay", "music causes moral decay" sorts of studies. Social networks are modern, so they're suspicious, and probably evil, right?
This is fascinating. It's not the classic "people don't have social lives in the real world because they are on line too much" argument. The authors argue that following people who are "different" from you is bad for you. They write:
"Compared to face-to-face interactions, online networks allow users to silently observe the opinions and behaviors of an immensely wider share of their fellow citizens. The psychological literature has shown that most people tend to overestimate the extent to which their beliefs or opinions are typical of those of others. There is a tendency for people to assume that their own opinions, beliefs, preferences, values, and habits are âoenormalâ and that others also think the same way that they do. This cognitive bias leads to the perception of a consensus that does not exist, or a 'false consensus' (Gamba, 2013)."
"The more people used Facebook at one time point, the worse they felt afterwards; the more they used Facebook over two weeks, the more their life satisfaction levels declined over time. The effects found by the authors were not moderated by the size of people's Facebook networks, their perceived supportiveness, motivation for using Facebook, gender, loneliness, self-esteem, or depression, thus suggesting the existence of a direct link between SNSs' use and subjective well-being."
This is a new result, and needs confirmation. Are homogeneous societies happier ones? Should that be replicated on line? Should efforts be made in Facebook to keep people from having "different" friends?
I think "free speech," is probably not really apropos to most social media.
I can speak freely on Facebook and get banned. There are Terms of Service and crap that says, essentially, that Facebook gets everything and I get nothing, in the way of protected activity.
I agreed to that when I signed on to that chicken shit outfit, right?
Also, censorship and Facebook doesn't sound right, either. It's their property. Facebook could fold on people who don't pay anything and they don't owe us a backup or stuff.
I can't think of any free place I visit where I can demand any kind of rights at all.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Time for the Final Solution to the Facebook Problem! Am I right, comrade?
Social networks make being a shut-in more socially acceptable when online meetings become a substitute for the real thing. FB meetings tend to be faceless except for your liberally retouched profile photo. And who knows if you're still having an intimate chat with that person in the photo and not her husband or the FBI already? With the possible exception of celebrities, you don't need the skills of an undercover agent to impersonate somebody in FB.
I tend not to use a lot of social media, but I do know several people who use Facebook almost constantly. They often find they are offended by things people said, they frequently encounter personal attacks or see stories about disasters or tragedy. It seems to me using Facebook or Twitter is a good way to lose friends because people, sitting at home, tend not to think about how their commends or posts will affect others who read their feeds.
In a similar vein, people who watch a lot of TV news seem to be more stressed or depressed than people who do not, at least in my social group. I think people need to unplug more to help keep the world in perspective. For example, after reading /. or arguing on a tech forum about some issue I'll often go outside and talk to the neighbours or enjoy a walk to clear my head.
You do realize the person who Godwins the thread automatically looses right?
Perhaps people more likely to be depressive -- the shut-ins, the antisocial, or those without enough money to pay for real life social gatherings -- are more likely to use social networks extensively.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
If you haven't got a thick skin, get off the internet. People will disagree with you, contradict you, post things that make you uncomfortable or that you find downright revolting.
The world is not "your oyster." People who disagree with you and that you find disagreeable have every bit as much right to be there as you. And when you consider the fact that some people find your Bible quotes and homilies offensive (as do I), it soon becomes clear that it's impossible to please everyone.
If you only want to hang out with like-minded people, form a nice little coffee-clique of people and socialize instead of trying to find "happiness" on the 'net.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
You have rights (and responsibilities) in all media, including this one. If it's telecoms your message doesn't even have to be public to come into jurisdiction.
Well phrased.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
This has been the truth that everyone but children have observed for a long time. Children grow by trying things on there own, but there's always a meta-level about which they are clueless.
Similarly *every* group can benefit from an outside perspective. Yes, even those I'm a member of. The outside perspective isn't just the naysayers -- those can become just the other side of the same coin -- but rather those that encourage us to think in previously unconsidered dimensions, or to see the bigger context.
Mentoring -- we all have it, whether we know it or not, but not all of us pick other kids as mentors. Until we get into an outcast group, or get into social media. Then it's almost inevitable that we loose adult supervision. Oooh, look at us, we're radical innovative history-making self-defined self-delusional detached ... wow I need a hug and don't even know it. Help!
Being constantly hammered by a ceaseless barrage of unnecessary hostility is detrimental to one's well being?
Whodathunkit?
Self-moderation is one of those things that we've always had more of 20 or 30 years ago.
Facebook (and Google) is already deciding what you will see, based upon who they think you want to see. Or, in the case of Google, what you want to see. You can try to get more neutral search results by never signing in, and by tossing cookies regularly, (or using a different search engine), but you cannot do that with Facebook. It really annoys me that Facebook decides who I get to see in my feed. Just because I don't reply to someone's posts doesn't mean I don't want to see their posts.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
I find interacting with others on 4chan in /adv/ and /b/ a place to find compassionate, thoughful responses in the safety on Anonymity.
I'm clinically depressed, physically exhausted due to irreversible health problems, and there is nothing to be done medically about my declining cognition.
I'm fucked, but on 4chan I can interact with others in positive ways for all concerned.
Yes, there are some sick fucks, but laughter is often healthy. There was no place like it when I was young.
"You have rights (and responsibilities) in all media ..."
Subject to the Terms of Service that I agree to.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Censorship is the suppression of speech. For example: "You can't talk about Oranges, they are evil!"
Moderation is the regulation of speech: "You can talk about Oranges, just not here. Go over there to talk about Oranges."
A related problem is the "Free Speech Zones" outside political party rallies. They do not censor speech, but they do prevent you from speaking in some portion of the public square. To the extent that Facebook has become the public square, the cost to society of speech prohibition in that forum is the same. To the extent that "Free Speech Zones" are an infringement of free speech, and Facebook has become the public square, Facebook presents the same risks to society.
This is not merely a question of how you dice the legal technicalities, it is a question of the purpose and means of free speech. Free speech is more important to our society in the long run than any other right; it is the basis of having a strong GDP upon which Facebook can build its business. If Facebook becomes destructive of the system, it is our rationally self-interested duty as a society to stop it, even if the particular existing legal terms can be parsed in a way that says it is legal.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance