Why did I deactivate my facebook account? I was actually looking for a button that would delete my account. Was I acting out of rage or an emotional outburst? To a certain degree, yes I did. The truth is, I didn’t go on facebook very often even when my account was active. My average login rate was about one to three times a month, and three times a month would be on the high end. I must ask myself, why did I log in so sparsely? Well several weeks ago, there was an article that came out on yahoo that pinpointed exactly what I felt. Facebook makes me unhappy. Whenever I log in, it’s usually to respond to a friend who posted something on my wall or sent me a message. Otherwise, I hesitate to login and read the comments or view the pictures of people who I would not even consider acquaintances. Well why do I feel hesitant to read others’ comments and pictures? For one, the majority of comments and pictures have nothing to do with me. I’m not the type of person who will comment on a stranger’s comment or pictures. This then brings up, why do I even have strangers on my facebook list of friends? When I say strangers, I know these people go to my school. I know we went to the same high school. But, other than that, I do not know anything about them. I don’t know who they are as a person, what they like to do, or even what classes they may have been taking that year. Some of these people, even if I were sitting next to them in class, I still would not be talking to them. Some people might think that the reason for this is purely because I’m an antisocial and hostile individual. I do need my quiet time, and after seeing people for 8 hours a day at school, I’m ready to go home and recharge my social batteries. Yes, I would agree that I tend to be reticent in settings of four or more people. I tend to avoid people who are loud and noisy. I also avoid people who give off an attitude either by the way they dress and/ or behave. Unfortunately, this is one of the biggest misunderstood myths about introverts which I already covered in the “My Most Memorable Yearbook Comment” post.
Out of the 200 plus number of “friends” I had on facebook, I would consider less than 10 to be real friends. Why do we add people we don’t care about? Some people have hundreds of friends, so I understand that some people will want to match that number to show others how popular they are. Adopting this attitude, people start to add others, even if they don’t actually care about them, to prove their popularity. People who receive these friend requests don’t want to be rude, so they accept. And soon enough, everybody has hundreds of facebook friends. Surely people add others also because, subconsciously, they want to show their peers how cool they are to boost their social status. Pictures of parties with dozens of people posing for the camera, smiling, and appearing to have fun. In the not too distant past, I cared about smiling for the camera to try to show myself that I was good looking and was enjoying the moment, just like how celebrities would pose for cameras. Looking back on those pictures though, I can tell which smiles were genuine and in the moment, and which ones were faked. I would never post pictures of obvious failed attempts to smile on facebook. I wanted to show people the best pictures of me. I wanted to show to the world the pictures where I looked sexiest in. Ones that showed my muscles, oh yea, those were going on facebook. Pictures that I looked attractive in, those went up too. Pictures that would present me as not so good looking, those were denied as reality as those pictures did not go online. I don’t believe I am the only person to have presented myself as I did on facebook.
The fact is, facebook is a tool to show everyone in your school how cool you are, not to say that it doesn’t help share your life with your true friends. Those who come close to the media’s ideals of beauty and standards, post their pictures and comments about what they did to substantiate how “cool” they are and how they live up to Hollywood’s standards. For the rest of us that don’t meet up with the media’s standards, we are negatively affected by facebook. It’s a harsh truth unfortunately. Seeing people who I don’t care about having fun and “fake smiling” makes me feel disconnected from the majority of people my age. I feel out of place and annoyed at seeing how great other people’s lives are on a superficial level.
An excerpt from the article, “Facebook: Friends' Happy Pictures Make You Sad?”, seems to corroborate how I feel about facebook.
This is what it says, “According to the study, Facebook is making us sad. Why? It's all about the kinds of pictures people post on their pages.
Facebook photos generally depict smiling, cheerful people having good times, conveying a sense of happiness. Of course everyone likes to smile for the camera, so that good cheer may be inflated or false. As others view the photos, they may believe this conveyed sense of intense happiness is real, making them think that their friends are much happier than they are.”
It goes on to say, “After controlling for race, gender, religious beliefs and whether the volunteers were unattached or in a relationship, the researchers saw a pattern: The more time students spent on Facebook, the more they thought others had it better than they did.”
I’m glad to know that I’m not the only one who feels this way. At the end of the day, I am much happier when I am not on facebook reading comments of what people may have done or viewing pictures that display an inflated sense of happiness. I love the few friends I have, and I will no longer subject myself to the superficial, surface-level happiness depicted by others on facebook that merely suggests, “Look how great my life is, even though, it’s not”.
http://news.yahoo.com/feeling-sad-facebook-could-cause-180318638--abc-news.html
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