The Facebook Effect: was life better or worse?

By Eva Pattullo and Ani Ngawhika

We think Facebook has played a huge role in the way we live today. It certainly has its positives but we believe the negatives easily out weigh the good things about Facebook. We did a survey asking a range of people over 18 whether they thought that life was better before Facebook. We thought that most people would say that life was better because we certainly know from experience that some adults despise Facebook and are always telling us to “stop wasting time on Facebook.” However, we were surprised at the final results because 55% of people thought that life was better compared to a close 45% who didn’t. 

The most common answer for the 45% of people who think life is better with Facebook was that it’s easier and cheaper to keep in touch with friends and family overseas and it’s easier to make arrangements and show people what you’re up to. We can’t deny that these are wonderful things about Facebook but do you notice how short that list is? We’re guessing you can probably tell that we are anti-Facebook but we don’t want you to get the wrong idea. We both have Facebook but could quite easily not. In this generation it would be considered weird for us (14 and 15 years old) to not have Facebook. We have to somewhat agree with our parents here because when we go on Facebook it’s probably because we’re bored and just time wasting. 

Now, on to the negatives … this may take a while. Bullying was mentioned a lot in the survey. It’s easier to bully people over the internet and Facebook is the perfect platform to do so. It’s ridiculously easy to set up an anonymous profile and post hate comments about someone or message them hurtful things. This leads on to a very good point that one of our survey respondents brought up “positive messages are read as more neutral than they are intended to be; neutral messages are read as more negative as they are intended to be and one can only imagine what happens with messages that are intended to be negative.” The problem with messaging is that you don’t know what tone of voice or facial expression the person is using so how are you meant to know how to react? Another point that was commonly mentioned was the fact that Facebook is distracting you from spending time with your real friends and not just your virtual ones. “You can be in a room with someone but they are only there with you in body. Their mind is consumed by what's going on in their Facebook world.” We’re ashamed to say that we’re guilty of this. It just seems so normal to have a quick scroll through our newsfeed no matter where we are or who we’re with but when it’s written down like that we realise how tragically sad it is. “People need to learn to be present in the moment.”

Although there are so many more negatives we’ll just touch on one more. Facebook makes people insecure about themselves. We can have a special glance into people’s lives which can be seen as a positive but we think it’s more of a negative. “Facebook = FAKEbook. People only post things that make them look good, which makes other people feel inadequate, if they believe it all.” We totally agree with this person and we also know from experience. People will take hours to get the perfect profile picture, they have to do their make up, get the perfect background, get the perfect lighting and then proceed to take a thousand pictures until they get the perfect smile. How does this show who you are if you have to take several hours to get there? Seeing these unrealistic and distorted pictures that your so called “friends” paint of themselves can lead you to an idealistic view of what life should be and when life isn’t like that at all it leaves you feeling down in the dumps. “What if I don’t get enough likes on my profile picture? becomes a common question and self value becomes based on the amount of appreciation that so called “friends” on Facebook will give, just by liking a post, by the click of a button.”