The secret history of Facebook depression

from PHYS.ORG:

To early users, the internet held such promise for people and communities. Now, on the eve of Facebook's 15th birthday, social media is making people depressed. What happened?
Since it launched in 2004, Facebook has been working to "give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected."

This sounds great. But is it, actually?

Does connecting with everyone you've ever met ever on Facebook make you happy? Does sharing everything with them on Facebook make you jump out of your seat with joy? Probably not.

In fact, if the research is any indication, you may actually be finding Facebook and other social media sites aren't so great for your mental health. Instead of feeling blissfully open and connected with your friends, you feel inadequate or maybe even a bit depressed.

Is social media making us sad because technology is inherently alienating? Is Facebook actually just evil?
We've been asking questions about technology like this for a rather long time. But the answer is a bit more complicated.

Ye olde internet

If you were an internet researcher in the 1990s (when the internet was first going mainstream), you would have been aware of two key ways of imagining the future: utopian and dystopian.

In their 1998 review of the literature, British researchers Debra Howcroft and Brian Fitzgerald summarised these two strands and the internet's predicted impact on the world.

In the utopian vision, the internet was not only "the gateway to a new era of democracy, equity, plenitude and knowledge" but would also "liberate interpersonal relationships from the confines of physical locality and create opportunities for new personal relationships and communities".

Sound familiar? It sure sounds like a fancy version of Facebook's mission statement: to bring the world closer together.

In the dystopian vision, on the other hand, "technology exacerbates human misery as individuals become increasingly controlled by what they fail to understand."

Fake news anyone?

And, as they go on, online relationships could be described as "shallow, impersonal, and often hostile."
This may also seem familiar and perhaps more in line with today's lived experience of social media.

So is that it? Were the techno-dystopians right and the reason Facebook makes us depressed is simply because it's the nature of the internet to cause misery?

It depends. Let's look at some more clues.

Context collapse

If you were using Facebook back then, you may remember the drama created as the site's design started making people share more and be less private.

Once a largely locked-down site only for college and university kids (and thus populated with large numbers of photos featuring drunken antics), Facebook became open to everyone in 2006.



The trouble it caused went like this.

In everyday life, we tend to have different sides of ourselves that come out in different contexts. For example, the way you are at work is probably different from the way you might be at a bar or at a church or temple.

Sociologist Erving Goffman used concepts of theatre to explain these different aspects of our identities, for example, front stage and back stage.

But on Facebook, all these stages or contexts were mashed together. The result was what internet researchers called context collapse. People were even getting fired when one aspect of their lives was discovered by another (i.e. their boss!).

Meeting Mark Zuckerberg

In 2008, I found myself speaking with the big boss himself, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. I was in the second year of my Ph.D. research on Facebook at Curtin University. And I had questions.

Why did Facebook make everyone be the same for all of their contacts? Was Facebook going to add features that would make managing this easier?

To my surprise, Zuckerberg told me that he had designed the site to be that way on purpose. And, he added, it was "lying" to behave differently in different social situations.

Up until this point, I had assumed Facebook's socially awkward design was unintentional. It was simply the result of computer nerds designing for the rest of humanity, without realising it was not how people actually want to interact.

The realisation that Facebook's context collapse was intentional not only changed the whole direction of my research but provides the key to understanding why Facebook may not be so great for your mental health.

Your perfect self

The key to understanding social media depression lies in the social norm that has emerged around how we manage Facebook's context collapse in a way that is acceptable in all contexts. That social norm is being your perfect self. And the consequence of that is we are all performing our perfect selves, thus all making each other feel depressed and inadequate.

It didn't have to be this way

Before Facebook, there were many other sites that did similar things but in a different way. My favourite was LiveJournal (which still exists in a different incarnation, but that's a whole other story).

In its heyday in the early 2000s, LiveJournal had a strong privacy culture. People used pseudonyms and avatars rather than their 'real selves', which was the norm on the internet before Facebook came along.

Before I began research on Facebook, LiveJournal was the focus of my research. I found that the site culture fostered vulnerability, authenticity and mutual support. People would share the highs and the lows of their lives with each other.

LiveJournal was also run as an open source community project rather than a for-profit venture—users were the customers rather than eyeballs to sell to advertisers.

This alternate social media culture shows that social media can be (and was) different. It can support mental wellness rather than harm it.

Peak social media depression?

BJ Novak (who fans of the American version of The Office will recognise) just launched an app called Kiyo, whose tag line is "let's just be ourselves again."

The app's mission sits in stark contrast to Facebook's goal of connecting everyone, always. As the app's description on ProductHunt reads:

Perhaps we've reached peak toxic social media culture, and we're about to turn a corner.

Buh Bye 2016

The Sad Truth: Nauseatingly profound illustrations of what the world is turning into

From Tara McGinley at Dangerous Minds:

 

Everything that’s bleak about the modern world is wrapped-up like a perfect, little package with these illustrations by London-based artist and animator, Steve Cutts. Rampant consumerism. Shitty jobs. Environmental devastation. Disinformation. Nonsense. Billionaire psychopaths. Overcrowded cities—all present and accounted for. We’ve featured Cutts’ work here on DM before with his dark animation about the current lives of ‘80s cartoon characters.

If a picture paints a thousand words, these pieces are Molotov cocktails for the mind.

 



 



 



 



 



 



 



 



 



 



 



 



 

via Bored Panda

Depressions in landscape & emotion.

An unstaged, mid-run, terrestrial-based short with Rob Krar.
Krar, new to ultra running, holds the speed record for the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim-to-rim and has quickly become a dominant force in American races.
Shot entirely with the Freefly Movi M5 and Canon 5d mk3.
thewolpertinger.com

Rare Color Photographs Of The Great Depression

It was an era that defined a generation. The Great Depression marked the bitter and abrupt end to the post-World War 1 bubble that left America giddy with promise in the 1920s. Near the end of the 1930s the country was beginning to recover from the crash, but many in small towns and rural areas were still poverty-stricken.

These rare photographs are some of the few documenting those iconic years in colour. The photographs and captions are the property of the Library of Congress and were included in a 2006 exhibit Bound for Glory: America in Color. The images, by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, shed a bleak new light on a world now gone with the wind.

thanks, PreSurfer

Dumber & Dumber: Were Dragons and Unicorns on Noah's Ark?

from Richard Metzger at DangerousMinds



As if there is any doubt posed by the question “Are we slouching towards Idiocracy?” what else can a sane person conclude when confronted with headlines like “Conservatives Split Over Oppposition to Anti-Obesity Campaign” (WHO would be PRO-obesity aside from a politically astute moron like Sarah Palin? Surely the morbidly obese must make up a large percentage of her supporters) and “Kentucky Creationist Museum to Feature Dragons, Unicorns.”

Aside from a similar accident of birth on the North American land mass, I don’t perceive myself as having ANYTHING in common with someone who believes that dinosaurs and unicorns were on Noah’s fucking Ark (or Sarah Palin supporters for that matter)! Do you? Where is the commonality when IQs have become this stratified? And where is this mess headed when the stupidest people in the country are the only ones reliably voting? It’s really getting frustrating to read the news these days. I feel like there is a new low reached almost daily. The dumbness used to be a little more spread out.

Truly, it’s undeniable at this juncture that “the dumbs” are really starting to take over and if these shit-for-brains types are allowed to continue dominating the conversation, then all bets are off for the future of the American republic. I can’t help but to feel we’re about to reach a tipping point towards some serious bad craziness. If you can convince a man that dinosaurs and unicorns were on Noah’s Ark, you can convince this man of ANY darned thing (like millionaires and billionaires pay too much in taxes or that Sarah Palin is qualified to be president).

Reblogging this from Barefoot and Progressive:

I asked Answers in Genesis if there will be dinosaurs on their Ark. They said yes.

I’ve since asked if there will be fire-breathing dragons on their Ark.

My visit to the Creation Museum last week told me that the answer is a strong “probably so.” Digging through the AiG archives this morning, I now see that Ken Ham says the answer is an emphatic “yes”:

Being land animals, dinosaurs (or dragons of the land) were created on Day Six (Genesis 1:24–31), went aboard Noah’s Ark (Genesis 6:20), and then came off the Ark into the post-Flood world (Genesis 8:16–19). It makes sense that many cultures would have seen these creatures from time to time before they died out.

There will be dragons on their Ark. [What about Godzilla or Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster? Will non-American “dragons of the land” be considered for inclusion?—RM]

But here’s one more question for you: Will there be unicorns on the Ark?

According to Ken Ham and AiG, the answer is yes.

“Some people claim the Bible is a book of fairy tales because it mentions unicorns. However, the biblical unicorn was a real animal, not an imaginary creature.”

“Modern readers have trouble with the Bible’s unicorns because we forget that a single-horned feature is not uncommon on God’s menu for animal design. (Consider the rhinoceros and narwhal.) The Bible describes unicorns skipping like calves (Psalm 29:6), traveling like bullocks, and bleeding when they die (Isaiah 34:7). The presence of a very strong horn on this powerful, independent-minded creature is intended to make readers think of strength.”

“The absence of a unicorn in the modern world should not cause us to doubt its past existence. (Think of the dodo bird. It does not exist today, but we do not doubt that it existed in the past.). Eighteenth century reports from southern Africa described rock drawings and eyewitness accounts of fierce, single-horned, equine-like animals. One such report describes “a single horn, directly in front, about as long as one’s arm, and at the base about as thick . . . . [It] had a sharp point; it was not attached to the bone of the forehead, but fixed only in the skin.”

“To think of the biblical unicorn as a fantasy animal is to demean God’s Word, which is true in every detail.”

There will be unicorns on the Ark. So this is what we’re left with:

Thanks to [Governor] Steve Beshear, Kentucky is no longer just known as the state whose governor endorsed and gave $40 million in tax breaks to people who want to tell children that science and history explain that a 600 year old man herded dinosaurs onto a big boat 4,000 years ago.

No, Kentucky will now be known as the state whose governor endorsed and gave $40 million in tax breaks to people who want to tell children that science and history explain that a 600-year-old man herded dinosaurs, fire-breathing dragons and unicorns onto a big boat 4,000 years ago.

But Steve Beshear wasn’t elected to debate religion, he was elected to create jobs…

Ouch! I just want to pull the covers over my head when I read something like this, don’t you? Obviously, requesting a unicorn chaser would not really be appropriate here…

 

 

If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking? (Discovery)

At least I let a week go by into the new year before i posted some of this depressing reality.
Here's another from Richard to get you even more upset.

‘AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM’: AMERICANS ARE THE EXCEPTION, JUST NOT NECESSARILY IN A GOOD WAY

If you're depressed, the world really looks gray

from MSNBC

Retina scans show problems seeing black-and-white contrast differences

The world really does look gray to depressed people, at least on a subconscious level, new research suggests.

Researchers at the University of Freiburg in Germany had previously shown that people with depression have difficulty detecting black-and-white contrast differences. But the scientists had used a somewhat subjective measure — psychophysical tests — and others in the field had suggested perhaps depressed individuals had a harder time holding their attention and that explained the results.

The new study, published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, relies on an objective measure of the retina, suggesting depressed people may see the world in a different way from the non-depressed.

"These data highlight the profound ways that depression alters one's experience of the world," said Dr. John Krystal, editor of the journal. "The poet William Cowper said that 'variety's the very spice of life,' yet when people are depressed, they are less able to perceive contrasts in the visual world. This loss would seem to make the world a less pleasurable place."

Vision test
The research team had 40 patients with major depression and 40 healthy individuals view a sequence of five black-and-white checkerboards of different contrasts. Each checkerboard flickered (with a black square turning white and white turning black) 12 times per second on a computer screen.

Meanwhile, the researchers used an objective measure called the pattern electroretinogram, which is similar to an electrocardiogram (ECG) of the retina of the eye. The retina ECG shows the response of neurons inside the retinal cells. "That's not conscious vision, it's much earlier than you conscioulsy perceive something, within milliseconds," said lead researcher Dr. Ludger Tebartz van Elst.

The depressed patients had dramatically lower retinal responses to the varying black-and-white contrasts than healthy individuals. The results held regardless of whether patients were taking antidepressants.

Since conscious vision wasn't measured, the researchers can't say for certain whether the patients would be aware of the visual "impairment" in the real world, though they suspect that would be the case.

How the depressed eye works
While the researchers aren't sure exactly why depressed people might sort of "see the world as gray," they have a strong hypothesis. Here's how they figure it works: Contrast vision relies on so-called amacrine cells within the retina, which horizontally connect the retina's neurons called ganglion cells with each other. These cells rely on dopamine, a substance known to be important for drive and attention – when lacking, two main symptoms of depression.

"We think the retina is some sort of outpost marker of the integrity of the dopaminergic system in the whole brain," van Elst said. So the dopamine is linked with both the vision and the depression.

The finding has plenty of practical implications, van Elst said, including acting as an indicator of whether anti-depression drugs are working. In addition, the test could provide an objective measure of depression, as clinical tests are not always reliable.

"It's really amazing that we are able to distinguish healthy controls from depressed patients. That means we have an objective marker for essentially the subjective state of being depressed," van Elst told LiveScience.

The study scientists noted that although these findings are strong, they still need to be replicated in further studies.

* 7 Thoughts That Are Bad for You
* Different Colors Describe Happiness vs. Depression
* Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind

from LiveScience.com. via MSNBC

thanks, Chris!

photo above from The Idealist