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 off, tune out.

[pubwvj]

Turn them off,
Tune them out.
Stay sane.

Re:Turn off, tune out.

[Beck_Neard]

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.

Re:Turn off, tune out.

[Zontar The Mindless]

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.

parasitical

[epyT-R]

'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.

Re:Turn off, tune out.

[DNS-and-BIND]

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.

Re:Turn off, tune out.

[epyT-R]

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?

Re:Turn off, tune out.

[Jarik C-Bol]

What are you trying to hide?

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