Social media/mental health

(This isn't really about Dreamwidth per se, but Dreamwidth is better for hosting long text posts than other platforms, the irony.)

One of the common criticisms of social media in terms of its effect on mental health is the potential for jealousy. Many people, when they post about their own lives, are more likely to share happy moments than sad ones. Therefore, someone reading their friends' posts is potentially going "wow, they look like they're having so much fun all the time and are never upset! I must be a real loser in comparison."

 

However, I have not found this to be the case for me personally. For one thing, different things make different people happy. When I see pictures of my friends who are now parents, my reaction is often "wow, what a cute baby, I want to tickle it and play peek-a-boo with it," but I never say "wow, I wish I was in my friends' shoes"--parenting seems really hard, and I don't think it's a challenge I'm cut out for, at least not right now. Similarly, if I were to post a picture of myself having fun at a baseball game, many of my sports-hating friends would probably think "ugh, better you than me." Besides, the reason why I follow these people in the first place is hopefully because I like them and want to be happy for them when they're happy--if they're such jerks that seeing their happiness makes me miserable, either I probably never "friended" them in the first place, or I blocked them to stop displaying their posts after a while.

 

But I think the operative phrase in the above assumption is "when they post about their own lives." Social networks such as Facebook originally evolved as places for people to post their own mundane life news. However, some of them found that they could be more profitable/generate more activity by making it easy to "share" content from other users or news sources. Sometimes this will cross sites--you see pictures of screencapped tweets on Tumblr, or reddit threads on Facebook, because something has far outstripped its source.

 

One obvious problem with this that has been discussed at length elsewhere is the potential for misinformation and conspiracy theories to spread rapidly. But even without that, there's an issue with accurate news: news per se, unlike "mundane things my friends did yesterday," is far more often than not bad. If your culture values performative outrage, doom-and-gloom rage or lashing out at societal in-groups, then that's the content you share, even second- or third-hand. Sites like Twitter and Facebook don't have good mechanisms for filtering that out and allowing readers to subscribe to the users they came to hear from. Why should they? Attention and newsclicks give them $$.

 

So before you (generic you, this isn't targeted at anyone specific) position yourself as an advocate for mental health, or claim that you oppose stigma, consider what kind of messages you're promoting the rest of the day/week/year. Are your friends likely to believe that people like them have lives worth living, if they listen to you?

 

(Part of why I'm often stuck spinning my wheels is that I find being overloaded with other people's problems to be really disturbing, and because I try to live by the golden rule, I am not willing to therefore dump my problems on others. Maybe it's an autistic thing, because a lot of neurotypicals especially come off as extremely masochistic this way with their magical empathy woo-woo.)