Facebook is making us miserable?

Yesterday, Daniel Gulati made a post entitled "Facebook is making us miserable" on Huffington Post. As I was reading it, I was thinking "Really? These are Facebook, or even social media issues?" After finishing the article, I felt his opinions were enough off-base that I wanted to jot down my thoughts on his three reasons that Facebook is making us miserable.

Before addressing each of Gulati's three points, an overall comment: I'm always skeptical when people make an argument using only anecdotal data. Are some people being made miserable by Facebook? Of course. Are the majority of Facebook users, or even a large number, being made miserable? Without at least some quantitative data, I'm usually going to assume I'm just seeing examples that are exceptions to the norm.

So what about these three distressing ways?

"First, it's creating a den of comparison." People have been keeping up with the Joneses at least since 1913, when the popular comic strip by that name debuted. Someone with envy issues will already have lots of fodder from offline friends, family, co-workers, people they see on TV and other media, etc. It seems unlikely to me that the addition of Facebook friends crosses a threshold that moves the needle from "not distressing" to "distressing."

"Second, it's fragmenting our time." Our time is fragmented by our culture and the devices we carry with us all the time, not because of the applications that run on them. My state's legislature believes people are fragmenting their time to the degree that they can't even drive without interruption - they recently passed a "no texting while driving law." But the law is specific to text messaging, and doesn't mention Facebook or any other mobile application. In their excellent book on change, Switch, one of the Heath Brothers describes how he turned off his network connection to physically stop incoming email so he could focus on writing the book. Yes, for many of us, our time is incredibly fragmented today, but learning to manage this fragmentation is something we need to do with or without Facebook.

"Last, there's a decline of close relationships." Without quantitative evidence there's nothing to make me believe this is true. Personally, Facebook allows me to communicate much more often with family and close offline friends than I ever did without it. Not only that, but because I can communicate with several people at once, it helps to build a group bond - I can share something interesting and my mother, my brother, and we can all discuss it. In my case, Facebook supplements and fortifies my offline relationships.

A cursory search of the web didn't find a lot on this topic. I found this recent paper, entitled "THE UNIVERSITY FACEBOOK EXPERIENCE: THE ROLE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING ON THE QUALITY OF INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIP" to be quite interesting. Essentially, the two authors did not find that Facebook is making us miserable.

I can't help but think that if someone were blogging 100 years ago they could have written an extremely similar post about the telephone and the "three new, distressing ways in which the [telephone] is fundamentally altering our daily sense of well-being," about how they now had to compare themselves to far-off friends who could call them to gloat, about how they were constantly interrupted by phone calls, and about how personal visits were being replaced by impersonal calls. Gulati's article reminds me of the book Cliff Stoll wrote in 1996, Silicon Snake Oil, where the author explained how the internet was degrading our quality of life. 15 years later, it's hard to read the book without a lot of chuckles and few guffaws.