Number of Facebook Friends Linked To Anxiety 144
Hugh Pickens writes writes "WebProNews reports that according to a new survey, the more Facebook friends you have, the more likely you are to feel stressed out by the site. 'The results threw up a number of paradoxes,' says Dr Kathy Charles, who led the study. 'For instance, although there is great pressure to be on Facebook there is also considerable ambivalence amongst users about its benefits.' Causes of stress included deleting unwanted contacts, the pressure to be entertaining, and having to use appropriate etiquette for different types of friends. 'Like gambling, Facebook keeps users in a neurotic limbo, not knowing whether they should hang on in there just in case they miss out on something good.'"
This just in: (Score:5, Insightful)
Information overload and a vague sense of ill-defined obligation leads to stress...
Really, any reason this is surprising?
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There's also the stress of having your sancha let the cat out of the box in an angry tirade readable by your saintly grandmother and your judgmental next door neighbor.
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There's also the stress of having your sancha let the cat out of the box in an angry tirade readable by your saintly grandmother and your judgmental next door neighbor.
This cat. Is it alive or dead?
Re:This just in: (Score:5, Funny)
This cat. Is it alive or dead?
Yes.
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What does it say when I have only 24 facebook friends and I'm still stressed out by all the "noise".
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Either that you need quieter friends, you're autistic, or both?
Re:This just in: (Score:4, Insightful)
What does it say when I have only 24 facebook friends and I'm still stressed out by all the "noise".
That you are masochistic enough to stay in a situation nobody forced you in?
Re:This just in: (Score:5, Insightful)
What does it say when I have only 24 facebook friends and I'm still stressed out by all the "noise".
That you are masochistic enough to stay in a situation nobody forced you in?
I have rarely and almost never observed actual masochism. What I usually witness instead is a mentality that thinks like this: "if I jump through the hoops and pay the price then maybe I'll get something I want." The difference of course is that, by definition, a real masochist isn't doing it out of hope for some reward or the achievement of some goal.
For as long as Facebook stories have appeared on Slashdot, I have said that the desire for the attention and evaluation of casual strangers is unhealthy. It's one of those "to fill a void" type of desires that is not natural; it's a response to the kind of sense of alienation of which Erich Fromm gives such a great description. It's one of those things where one must be careful to retain one's sense and objectivity, otherwise it is easy to mistake the increasing status of "common" with any sense of "normal". When something is being done not because it is voluntary and considered a joy, but out of some sense of desperation and unhealthy desire for attention, of course stress and anxiety is going to scale up with increasing involvement.
How could it work any other way? It's not a matter of whether anyone is forcing anyone -- clearly that is not the case. It's a matter of well-intentioned but thoroughly misguided compensatory problem-solving.
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It's one of those "to fill a void" type of desires that is not natural; it's a response to the kind of sense of alienation of which Erich Fromm gives such a great description... When something is being done not because it is voluntary and considered a joy, but out of some sense of desperation and unhealthy desire for attention, of course stress and anxiety is going to scale up with increasing involvement.
How could it work any other way? It's not a matter of whether anyone is forcing anyone -- clearly that is not the case. It's a matter of well-intentioned but thoroughly misguided compensatory problem-solving.
Interesting.
Seems to me you argue that the "having friends on FB" is not the cause of an eventual stress but a retribution of one's misguided attempts to escape other types of stress (in the context of TFA, a correlation between too-many-FB-friends/anxiety due of a common cause rather then causation).
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It's one of those "to fill a void" type of desires that is not natural; it's a response to the kind of sense of alienation of which Erich Fromm gives such a great description... When something is being done not because it is voluntary and considered a joy, but out of some sense of desperation and unhealthy desire for attention, of course stress and anxiety is going to scale up with increasing involvement.
How could it work any other way? It's not a matter of whether anyone is forcing anyone -- clearly that is not the case. It's a matter of well-intentioned but thoroughly misguided compensatory problem-solving.
Interesting.
Seems to me you argue that the "having friends on FB" is not the cause of an eventual stress but a retribution of one's misguided attempts to escape other types of stress (in the context of TFA, a correlation between too-many-FB-friends/anxiety due of a common cause rather then causation).
Universally, no. There are some people who really do simply enjoy using FB. There just aren't nearly enough of them to explain how it exploded overnight into such a trendy bandwagon that most people just had to jump on. There's a kind of compensatory desperation behind that one, a desire for the casual attention of strangers strong enough to make one ignore all of the privacy violations.
It's easier to understand once you get past one giant hurdle: by nature, human beings are not herd animals. That can
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Dear gods! What must you think of TWITTER? :s
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What does it say that I have (literally) 50 times more Facebook friends than you and I'm not stressed out at all?
It says that you genuinely enjoy using Facebook and are not using it to make up for a deeper dissatisfaction with what you do and don't have in your life.
That or you're in a hell of a lot of denial, but it's not my place to tell you which is true. In the absence of any strong evidence either way, I'm inclined to believe the former, for what it's worth.
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Since 1 in 50 persons is a sociopath, good luck with that.
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Don't be surprised how trusting many people are: http://www.time.com/time/travel/article/0,31542,2045092,00.html [time.com]
Jin, for instance, gives us a key to her place upon arrival, a common CouchSurfing custom that helps explain why sociologists at Stanford University are now studying the site and its ability to efficiently create trust.
"We believe that people are fundamentally good, and our service is designed around that premise," says CouchSurfing chairman and co-founder Daniel Hoffer. "Anytime you make yourself vulnerable in any way, you take a risk, and typically life rewards you for that risk."
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That you haven't discovered that you can kill the messages from the apps they use.
Correlation, causation, and all that (Score:3)
Well, a lot of things that aren't surprising, also aren't true. Especially when it comes to people, stereotypes and "common sense". That's why we want to see them confirmed by actual data.
In particular, here I'd really want to know which direction the causation goes. Because it's really the important bit.
- Do people generally get stressed by having to deal with lots of other people?
OR
- A person who is insecure and socially-anxious, _because_ they are insecure and socially-anxious, add large amounts of imagi
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Good question. To answer ask, "How many people wear their 'friend count' as a badge of honor? A sort of social status?".
Like Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
"Facebook keeps users in a neurotic limbo, not knowing whether they should hang on in there just in case they miss out on something good"
Just like slashdot. Been here for years and I'm still waiting ;)
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"New story, NOW. Dammit."
<refresh>
"WHERE ARE THE NEW STORIES!??!"
<refresh>
"YES! A new story!... oh, crap, it's posted by kdawson..."
<refresh>
Absolutely. (Score:2)
Especially at Valentine's day unless everything is very traditional and normal.
And then there are groups of friends who do not get along but share you.
I find it stressful.
Debating whether to withdraw or not. It doesn't seem to be providing a lot of benefit.
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Re:Absolutely. (Score:5, Insightful)
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The moral of this story is - friends on Facebook shouldn't be professional relationships. That's what LinkedIn is for, if you must.
Absolutely. All current work contacts are slightly limited in that they can't see my wall (by default) nor past mobile pics. I still post things (like links) with permissive permissions sometimes, but they're definitely limited in what they see. After we're no longer colleagues, I remove their restriction and we can be "real" friends. Works well for me.
LinkedIn is for professional contacts. My bosses and their bosses are on there.
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Or, deal with facebook same as LinkedIn, i.e. it's all professional relationships.
That way, even though you're commenting on a friends link, you won't go overboard, and any decisions whether to comment or not will be done conservatively so you won't be looked at as an immature retard.
That might help you in the future, if someone decides to look you up on facebook from your new workplace after you friended him/her.
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Generally a poor investment of time / echo chamber (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of the people on facebook are there trying to promote some business or other. The sad part is, if you add up all the time invested, you see that the return is ALWAYS negative. Unless you already have a brand, you're not going to "create a brand" on facebook. So you have all these self-proclaimed "social media gurus" generally claiming that they can "promote your brand", and people buy into it because, just like individuals, they're afraid that if they don't, they'll miss something. "Everyone else is doing it, so it must be working for them ..."
Of course, the only thing they're missing is that It's all thin gruel.
If you're a business, you WANT your competitors to be investing time and energy in facebook. Not only does it make it easy to "stalk" your competition, but the time and money they're wasting there are resources diverted from elsewhere.
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Interesting. Can you cite any sources that support your claim that investing in Facebook does not pay off?
Try the reverse. Try to find any facebook success stories that didn't involve either massive amounts of money or an already-existing brand. Facebook is simply a time-waster. When's the last time you bought a good or service because of someone's facebook presence? Or because they had oodles of fans? Or because 10 people liked it? It's a waste of time for small and medium-sized businesses, and large businesses don't need it.
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Facebook is a drag on the economy.
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I agree with you.
But I can't think of a single company that started on facebook and became successful.
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It's not just individuals. Same story goes for businesses.
A lot of the people on facebook are there trying to promote some business or other. The sad part is, if you add up all the time invested, you see that the return is ALWAYS negative.
Not true. At all. My wife has doubled her personal training business through Facebook. It is a way to be social, and acquiring/retaining personal training clients in an exercise in one-on-one social skills. Of course, most businesses are trying to use the one-on-one social network medium as a broadcast medium...and that don't work.
It's a very limited example. The exception that proves the rule, really.
Wow... (Score:4, Informative)
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Then again, the real world is a lot more stressful...
Stress isn't really linked to actual importance. Like losing your job is not necessarily more stressful than deleting a facebook friend. Stress is more about emotional attachment and an inability to resolve conflict.
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Then again, the real world is a lot more stressful...
Stress isn't really linked to actual importance. Like losing your job is not necessarily more stressful than deleting a facebook friend. Stress is more about emotional attachment and an inability to resolve conflict.
Not quite applicable in this scenario. Most people with "tons" of "Facebook Friends" don't even know the people. Having an "emotional attachment" to people you don't even know (causing a situation where deleting them causes emotional stress) would be the problem if your scenario is correct. It's an unreasonable reaction, and would still indicate that real world problems would (or should) be even more stressful to those types of people.
Sheesh (Score:1)
According to a new survey!? This has been going on as long as humans have been around (hello, social creatures?). This is nothing new, and certainly not limited to Facebook.
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I guess I'm not social. Just hate everyone, and everything. Especially everything related to facebook, which of course means that I need to now make an account, just to tell them how much I hate them.
Oh son of a...
FTFY (Score:2)
...the more Slashdot friends you have, the more likely you are to feel stressed out by the site.
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The reason for having the friends feature is so that you can bump up (or down) someone's comment score. Suppose you were a crochet hobbyist, and while reading Slashdot, you notice somebody
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+1 if you like Japanese "victorian" maids :3
Do I get a +2 if I take them in pairs?
You have ME :D (Score:1)
srsly, I started using that 'friend' button w/ people I agree with a lot so their posts sorta stand out (I read at -1 so sometimes there's a lot of crap to slog through, although curiously those posts aren't the low numbers but the higher ones). Heh, your name is enough reason to get that big green emerald on your posts.
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I feel my anxiety level going up :-O
You mean to tell me that I've been hiding in my mother''s basement for 30 years for nothing?
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Its cool, dude. I have no friends here.
Only foes you have already met?
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...the more Slashdot friends you have, the more likely you are to feel stressed out by the site.
Lets see, more than 100 freaks, more than 500 friends ... but they don't cause me stress. For most of us, it's more likely the b0rkenst0cked-out perl code and "site redesigns" that break things on a regular basis that are good for getting the natives restless ...
That and "come on guys, can't you at least proof-read a teeny tiny bit before posting the next story?" At least the number of dupes, trifectas (and even posting the same story SIX times the same week) seem to be down ...
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It would be interesting to search for a correlation between /. karma and stress. Maybe that was a reason for dropping the karma score...
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FWIW, I check the social aspects of Slashdot every few months or so. Whatever. Say what you will about the changes to Slashdot, but they integrated those social features long before it was a household word. They also did it in such a way that you can just ignore it. If it were something other than a bolt-on, it might be more important. Then again, that's not how Slashdot started, and it wasn't really hurting before all that came to pass. It would have been foolish to trash the whole focus of Slashdot
durf (Score:3, Insightful)
if you do something a lot, it may start to feel like a burden, and it's likely to generate stress
Scientific Research Run Amok... (Score:1)
Re:Scientific Research Run Amok... (Score:5, Funny)
but I really don't see the value in studying how people use facebook.
Its an experiment in behavioral psychology. One where the rat gets a shock no matter which lever it presses.
Re:Scientific Research Run Amok... (Score:4, Interesting)
I generally support just about any kind of scientific work, but I really don't see the value in studying how people use facebook. We all know it is for the most part a tremendous waste of time; I'm not sure what we have to gain by looking into how people use it.
I don't know if I'd say that. I have a lot of FB friends, about 80-90% of whom I've met in person at one point or another (I travel a lot and meet a lot of people, plus former classmates and colleagues, and people I'm attempting to connect with for the first time that I *should* know... Alumni from a group that I'm the Alumni outreach coordinator for).
Facebook in particular, and social networking in general, is the most efficient way known to man to maintain contact and a semblance of a relationship to a large number of people at once in a back-and-forth, interactive manner.
It's a time-waster if you sit there and just play social network games on it (Skinner Boxes). For the most part, I don't. I'm keeping up with the feed, commenting, liking, sharing, and re-posting. (It also helps that I have a job where I can keep a FB window open all day in-between other activities.
Maybe I just have more interesting friends than you? Or would otherwise work harder at keeping up with them? Don't know... But FB isn't a "tremendous waste of time" for me.
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Sounds like it's a tremendous waste of your employers time though (i.e. the time they paid you for)
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For starters it is a very convenient laboratory to test social networking theories. Do current theories about social networks in the real world apply in the virtual world? What aspects of virtual social networks apply to the real world? Theories about those aspects that do apply can potentially be tested much more easily in the virtual world than the real world.
It's a great place to make predictions, for example, about anxiety. Do we know how social networks effect our health? Good place to try and differen
There is a simple solution: (Score:1)
After all, what's wrong with being a hermit?
What Pressure? (Score:1)
100% correlation (Score:4, Funny)
Re:100% correlation (Score:5, Funny)
I have zero Facebook friends and zero stress about it. QED
I have you beat! I have zero friends. Period! ;-)
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Lies! [slashdot.org]
Delete (Score:1)
It became clear to me last year that 99% of facebook posts are absolute drivel. Facebook functionality could be used to define the word unutile. I went from daily check in's last summer, which slowed eventually to once a month. I deactivated my account in December.
I'm ditching my HTC desire because you can't uninstall facebook app unless I root it.
For all the facebook lovers out there I can only say that I feel really sorry for you.
hello everybody (Score:1)
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are you stressed ? If you are I can mark you as foe !
No Facebook friends (Score:2)
I never have any stress because I don't have Facebook.
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I have 21 facebook friends, and they're all people I know in Real Life (TM) but don't see very often due to geography. I only joined facebook in order to keep in touch with these people in a manner which email does not suffice. The people I do see frequently (i.e. work with) can fuck off.
Real life (Score:1)
Substitute "real life groups of friends you hang out with in person" and "Facebook friends" and you have the same exact problems and anxieties.
I hope no one actually paid to conduct or review the results of that survey.
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Just like any other abusive relationship(s) (Score:2)
Like the subject says. No real paradoxes in there.
The prob is real friends who have no pics (Score:2)
I have about 100 FB friend requests and the main prob is that a number, especially women, who I do in fact know, don't post pics or send an FR but don't have enuf info on the wall to be able to tell if it's really them or what.
And some recent local events made it so I didn't really want certain friends who weren't already FB friends to know what I was doing in the newsfeed until after I defeated their tunnel, so I left them in Pending status.
Then you get the spam fake ones and since I'm kind of known on the
Facebook needs low mods like /. (Score:2)
Fortunately, for me (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fortunately, for me (Score:4)
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But then how do you play Farmville?
Funny off-topic. But on a similar vein, I've been trying to find a Microsoft tag [microsoft.com] (colorful triangle-barcodes) decoder, and it is a web-enabled-smartphone-only commodity.
Windows didn't get the decoder, and our perfectly good digital cameras go unused for "encoded" hyperlinks advertised on local newspapers. Heck, the MS page shows a train station advertising schedules and they assume even New York tourists in that lower-Manhattan area must have access to expensive phones with data plans. What gives?
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Towering backyard 'oregano' plants that smell strangely of skunk. Same as last year.
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Indeed, but Facebook IS my real-life communication with my friends - all but one of my 21 facebook friends live > 150 miles from me and I use facebook to stay in touch with them. As far as I'm concerned it's just another comms tool alongside letter, phone and email. But one where you can interrupt other people's conversations with a witty remark, so it closer emulates hanging out with them in person than the other three communication methods I just listed.
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> I refuse to let social networks replace real life communication with my friends
Maybe it's because you're an "old fart," or maybe it's because you're resistant to change, but either way, you're missing the point of social networks. They ARE real-life communications with friends. Social networks are simply the next iteration of social change. I'm sure some long. drawn out extrapolation could be created, showing how technology changes communications. People said that the telegraph would destroy written co
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Thus, you are seeing the effect of people posting less and less useful, actual updates, and mostly just using the service as a photo update. Occasional status updates such as "I was here in ___" and "oh its raining i hate it" is about
So it's just like it is with real life friends (Score:2)
So it's just like it is with real life friends then.
Unless you're just collecting "friends" for games (Score:2)
I know who my "real" friends are on Facebook, and they're the only ones I pay close attention to (e.g. visit their pages.)
Then there are the couple hundred who share a cause. They post some interesting stuff and news articles for my feed.
And then there are another few hundred who were collected just to play that stupid "Mafia Wars" game. If I could know the difference between those who share a cause and those who were approved for the game, I'd get rid of the game "friends."
Unless you've got major
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There's a function called "lists" that you can use to organize (classify?) your contacts.
Not number of facebook friends (Score:2)
Reduce your Facebook stress (Score:2, Informative)
Here's a quick and easy way to pare down your friends list on Facebook:
"Hey, guys, I'm moving next month. Could any of you help me?"
Cut out anyone who ignores the request or doesn't give a reasonable excuse. Enjoy your friends list that's gone from three digits to nearly one!
Correlation not causation (Score:4, Interesting)
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I would have thought the opposite. (Score:2)
Because I heard about this one kid who didn't have a single facebook friend in the world.
Discussed 60 years ago by David Riesman (Score:1)
In his book The Lonely Crowd, Riesman postulated the existence of personality types whose sense of right and wrong developed in a way that was correlated with societal type. These personality types were distinguished based on how their sense of right and wrong developed.
In a relatively simple, pre-industrial society, individuals were "outer-directed"--they developed their sense of right and wrong from long established traditions. They thus felt *shame* when they deviated from society's expected ways of beh
Wow, now that /. agrees on the survey... (Score:1)
No one questions the validity of it....
relevant paragraph:
Apparently, if you agree with something there's no need to analyze where did it come from. The conclusions per se are interesting but many are debatable and might vary greatly if we switch the
Unwanted contacts? I accept everyone. (Score:2)
Causes of stress included deleting unwanted contacts
The cool thing about Facebook is the fine-grained control you have over posts. It's possible to create lists of friends, and then by default exclude them, or vice versa exclusively post to a certain list.
so WTF is my problem? (Score:2)
I have an account, but haven't logged in in... well, I can't even remember when.
I deleted my account (Score:2)
I signed up on Facebook, added some friends, went through all the privacy / apps settings to lock everything down and... nothing interesting happened. I deleted my account and nobody asked me why. If my friends have something really important to say to me, I expect them to tell me face-to-face, on the phone, by email, or using our private message board, in that order. Faceb
they should call it "fightbook" (Score:2)
Maybe this says more about my circle of friends than it does about facebook, but this is how it has become a source of stress for me:
When it started out, it was just me and some friends I'd made over the past say 8 or 9 years.
We held similar views on a lot of things, and mostly we were using it to point each other to interesting music (via youtube -- the new streaming napster), and share pictures of our kids.
Some time ... I don't know ... about 3 years ago ... it reached the saturation point where all of th
Nerds don't understand facebook (Score:2)
Of course (Score:2)
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