It’s not Facebook’s fault you’re lame.
Since the beginning of the Internet age people have bemoaned the quality of social engagement in our always-connected society. Soon after addresses went from things we put on envelopes to things that started with WWW, research began showing that increased Internet usage was associated with greater levels of unhappiness.
The advent of social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter have done nothing but increase the feelings of isolation and unhappiness. The mediated influence of computers and the Internet are imperfect replicating real human interaction, so the argument goes. Quick virtual communications can’t possibly take the place of the real thing.
But a new study indicates that perhaps the opposite is true. We aren’t unhappy because Facebook is imperfect at representing social interaction, we’re unhappy because it’s too good at representing social interaction. To understand why, you first have to accept the fact that you are lame.
Why you’re lame
You are probably one of the least interesting, wealthy and happy people you know. This isn’t opinion. It’s science. To understand why we have to take a journey back in time to an age when a Super Bowl ad only cost $800,000. The year was 1991 and sociologist Scott L. Feld published a paper describing the "friendship paradox", a phenomenon within social networks (flesh and blood social networks, not the digital kind) that most people have fewer friends then their friends have.
This seems like impossibility but it’s real phenomenon that can be described using mathematical formulas. One of the explanations is logical. The more friends a person has the more likely they are to be your friend. It throws off the curve. The other explanation is human nature. We are more likely to be drawn to the people who more charming and socially connected than ourselves.
The Internet made it much easier to create and maintain social connections so one might expect that the phenomenon to be less pronounced. The less effort it takes to maintain social connections, the less effort we put into vetting our potential friends. The opposite turns out to be true. Facebook and Twitter demonstrate the “friendship paradox” in the extreme. A recent study by researchers at the USC Information Sciences Institute found that 98% of people have fewer followers than those they followed and were less active. So science tells us that you have fewer friends than your friends and your friends are more socially active. Earlier this year, things got worse for you.
Researchers Young-Ho Eom at the University of Toulouse in France and Hang-Hyun Jo at Aalto University in Finland released a study showing that, not only do your friends have more friends, but also they are also wealthier and happier than you. The reason why your friends seem better off than you is because it is true. Facebook makes it easier for us see this. “This might be the reason why active online social networking service users are not happy,” said researchers Eom and Jo.
Before you get too upset over this keep in mind that all of those friends who are better and more awesome than you are having the same experience every time they log on. You can rest assured that they are miserable too.
Total Perspective Vortex
In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy the most horrible torture device in the universe is the Total Perspective Vortex. The device drives anyone placed inside of it mad by giving them a “glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here." The perspective on how small and insignificant we are in comparison to the immensity of the universe is supposed to drive any sentient creature mad.
Our digital social networks are acting like mini total perspective vortexes because of the friendship paradox. It is not that they are imperfect simulacra of flesh and blood networks. It’s that they do too good of a job allowing us to perceive where we stand within our network of friends. We were never meant to have that much insight into where we were in the friendship hierarchy.
