Can Social Networking Service make you sad?

by won so-yeon

What do you think about SNS? There is no doubt the fact that a great variety of Social Networking Services (SNS) such as Facebook or Instagram are connecting people all over the world. We can get information at anytime and anywhere. In addition we are able to communicate easily with friends or other people and strength personal relationships thanks to the social network. It is a tremendous development that is not imagined in the past. But everything has the defects of his qualities and SNS is no exception. There is an news article- Can Facebook make you sad?- that covered the disadvantages of Social Networking Service. He asserts that people can be connected with other people by using SNS, but to being connected does not help necessarily users happy and it can even reduce the satisfaction of the life. In this news article, they use the Facebook, the largest among social networking service, as an example. A team of psychologists from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the University of Leuven in Belgium did an experiment about how the use of Facebook affects the satisfaction of life over a period of time. The researchers asked the Facebook users five questions every day for two weeks. According to the result of that experiment, satisfaction of life of the people who use Facebook has decreased. The experimenters give a jealousy as potential evidence to this phenomenon.

Facebook users can see cousins or former school-friends routinely boasting about their career successes, holidays or new children on the network. Some researchers call this effect as “friendly world syndrome”, where it seems like everybody is having a better time than you. Therefore that envy makes the level of satisfaction of users decrease.

How many hours do you spend in front of the screen of social networking service? In my case, I constantly plugged into Facebook by my cell phone out of awareness. SNS is useful for me because I can keep in touch with my family in Korea and friends in foreign country such as Japan, America and Saudi Arabia. However, sometime I waste my time watching unnecessary contents that was updated in my social network. Also I become sometime envious when I see pictures that they take at good place or with boyfriend and sometime I feel angry because of rude or eccentric videos and articles. On the one hand, we can’t say that the reason of the phenomenon that reduction of life satisfaction when use social network is social network. I think that the user should use this technology well and think more subjective. First, we need to have healthy self-esteem. And we have to accept positively rather than to compare with others or feel jealous. Do not pay attention to unneedful things.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140206-is-facebook-bad-for-you