The Anti-Social Network
By Libby Copeland
According to Libby Copeland’s article Facebook is making us sad and depressed by helping people appear happy all the time. We have a habit of overestimating other people’s happiness and social networking contributes to making this worse. Copeland’s claim comes from "Misery Has More Company Than People Think," a paper in the January issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Copeland argues that ”By showcasing the most witty, joyful, bullet-pointed versions of people's lives, and inviting constant comparisons in which we tend to see ourselves as the losers, Facebook appears to exploit an Achilles' heel of human nature”
When we look at other people’s Facebook pages we compare our own lives to the pictures and post we see. Copeland and the paper “Misery Has More Company Than People Think," mean that we often overestimates other peoples happiness and think that they have a better life than we do, which makes us sad.
I don’t know if this is true, but it is an interesting question. We all tend to portray the happiest moments of our lives on Facebook. We choose a profile picture that we look good in (I have never seen a profile picture that makes the person look worse than in reality, unless it is a joke), make a status update about our latest accomplishments, and upload nice holiday pictures. I think that we all want attention, and we don’t get as much attention from sad and or everyday stuff.
So to make you all a little bit more depressed and sad I want you to look at this movie and see how cool I am!
"If we only wanted to be happy it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are”
