Facebook is bad for you. It just is. You know it is. I’m not saying you shouldn’t use it. We all do things that are bad for us and in moderation that’s ok. But don’t kid yourself. It’s bad for you.
Despite what this study says…
Among the findings of a phone survey of 2,255 American adults conducted by Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project last fall: Facebook users are more trusting of other people, they have larger numbers of close friends, they exhibit a higher level of civic engagement and they get more social support from their friends.
The survey's findings challenge the common perception that social networking sites isolate people or undercut their real-world friendships and interactions, said University of Pennsylvania professor Keith Hampton, the lead author of the report.
To my eyes there are two questions raised by this study…
1. Is the metric they use a good measure of social well being?
2. If not why would they use it?
On the first question let me address the individual points.
Someone who logs into Facebook multiple times a day is 43% more likely than other Internet users and more than three times as likely as someone who does not use the Internet to feel that most people can be trusted.
Social Well Being shouldn’t be measured by how much you trust total strangers since that is a function of life experience and not of one’s social interactions. Social interactions rely on how much you trust your friends and neighbors (a.k.a. the people you’re actually social with). In fact an over abundance of trust in strangers can indicate a lack of social well being. People who are desperately seeking friends because they don’t have any will be more inclined to trust total strangers.
Someone who uses Facebook several times per day averages 9% more close, core ties in their overall social network compared with other Internet users.
How exactly do you measure that? Because it seems that’s an easy metric to get wrong. For example, would knowing more about someone’s schedule make my “ties” to them closer? There are several people whose schedule I know because they posted it on Facebook yet I haven’t spoken to them in years. While there are people I speak to on a daily basis whose schedule I don’t know. So that’s just one way I could appear to have closer ties to someone I don’t actually interact with.
Someone who visits the site multiple times a day was two and a half times more likely to attend a political rally or meeting, 57% more likely to persuade someone to vote for a candidate and 43% more likely to have said they would vote.
I’m sorry but if your scale of “social well being” includes becoming deeply involved in political movements I think you need a new scale. For better or worse politics has become the worst side of many people’s personalities. It’s the place where people feel they can be hateful towards their fellow man. I’m not against being civic minded or knowing the issues. But that’s a function of research and spirited debate with people you disagree with. Political movements are about feeling so confident in your correctness that you surround yourself with like minded people and go around trying to bully others into joining you.
“they get more social support from their friends.”
Again this is a metric that’s easy to fake. Whenever someone posts about something bad happening to them there’s an outcry of “support”. But does a comment on your Facebook wall really mean you’re being supported by friends? Ask yourself this: Would you rather have 20 friends post “I’m so sorry for your loss” or one friend sit with you through the night and give you a shoulder to cry on? Who in those two scenarios is really being supported by their friends?
So, if I’m right and this study is flawed why is that relevant?
Part of being human is doing things that are bad for us. The trick is to only do those bad things in moderation. Drinking, Watching TV, even eating Pastry is bad in excess but enjoyable and relatively harmless if we control ourselves.
The largest barrier to self control is and always will be our ability to justify. Telling ourselves what we’re doing “isn’t that bad” is how we give ourselves permission to do more of it. That’s what this study is.
It’s an attempt by people who are obsessive about social media to justify that obsession with a bogus metric. The “lead author” of the report is someone who has currently dedicated his career to social media to give just one example. Given that do you really think he was going to design a survey that would discredit social media?
Again I’m not saying you shouldn’t use Facebook. If it makes you happy than more power to you. But don’t ignore the facts. Every second you spend on Facebook is a second not spent actually interacting with your friends and nothing anyone can say will change that.
Addendum: After I wrote this a link was published to the full report which can be found here: http://pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2011/PIP%20-%20Social%20networking%20sites%20and%20our%20lives.pdf. I don't have time to read it now but I did want to post this in regards to the "core ties" question above...
The average American has just over two discussion confidants (2.16) – that is, people with whom they discuss important matters. This is a modest, but significantly larger number than the average of 1.93 core ties reported when we asked this same question in 2008. Controlling for other factors we found that someone who uses Facebook several times per day averages 9% more close, core ties in their overall social network compared with other internet users.