Just about everyone has an opinion about Facebook. A favorite theme is loneliness. There are those who believe that Americans (among others) are becoming lonelier and that our habits of connecting by Facebook instead of in person are hastening our slide into isolation. From that perspective, people constantly posting status updates are revealing their own loneliness.
Others instead believe that Facebook allows people to stay connected when face-to-face gatherings are impractical or impossible. Those who use Facebook may in fact maintain more connections with other people. Their Facebook posts and other social media activity are added onto their in-person contacts, rather than substituting for them.
A just published study reports an experimental approach (the gold standard of research methodology) to the question of whether posting more Facebook status updates increases or decreases loneliness.
The key finding was that the students who posted more status updates felt less lonely at the end of the study than they had before. Those students felt more connected to their friends and more in touch with them than the students in the control condition, and that greater sense of connection seemed to be the driving force behind their lesser sense of loneliness.
The status updates were typically noticed by the students’ friends: 79% of all of the status updates were either “liked” or commented on or both. But getting a response from friends was not essential to the process whereby posting more status updates results in lesser feelings of loneliness. Students felt less lonely even if their status updates went unacknowledged (at least on Facebook; the authors did not track whether the students may have received responses through other channels such as email or in person). The authors speculated that because status updates are ways of communicating with others, the mere act of expressing yourself that way can alleviate loneliness.
There are limitations to the research, of course. For one thing, the study lasted just a week. The authors believe that posting status updates is akin to what others have called “social snacking.” When we do things like looking at pictures and reading emails, we remind ourselves of our ties with other people, and that decreases our loneliness: “Similar to a snack temporarily reducing hunger until the next meal, social snacking may help tolerate the lack of ‘real’ social interaction for a certain amount of time.”
Source:http://blogs.psychcentral.com/single-at-heart/2013/08/facebook-status-updates-as-social-snacking-keeping-loneliness-at-bay-until-a-real-meal-comes-along/?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=PsychCentral
Reference: Deters, F. G., & Mehl, M. R. (2013). Does posting Facebook status updates increase or decrease loneliness? An online social networking experiment. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 4, 579-586.