Will Facebook Make Us Sick?

This would be good for April 1 except that these results are true. People do say that Facebook has caused many social and health problems, forgetting that correlation is not causation.

Inspired by the post, The Things That Facebook Causes, According To Google, Yahoo & Bing, in SearchEngineLand, I wondered about the effects of other social media. Other people have been commenting on this including the Daily Telegram.

First, let’s look at Facebook. The post mentioned many dire things that Facebook is supposed to cause according to Google searches and the content that comes up. So I tried the experiment myself. You can see the results below as - Facebook causes - in the Google search field prompts these suggestions: Facebook causes divorce, application, depression, donations, internet explorer to crash, app, jealousy, problems, statistics, and cancer.

I am sure some feel the IE crash as the worst problem leading to the others. Now some of these results actually link to stories about the dire consequences of Facebook. Other show the shortcomings of the literal nature of Google search returns and link to stories about noble causes that Facebook supports as you can see in the two returns below for the search Facebook causes cancer, one of the associations above. This first story is about how Facebook can raise your risk of cancer but the second one is about: Causes on Facebook - the campaign for cancer prevention.

So what about other related topics? I have written about how social media can be addictive and some have major concerns about the troubles that enterprise 2.0 might cause.  I have asked if Twitter like going out for a smoke? So I looked.  Google did not suggest that social media causes anything.

I got same result for enterprise 2.0 and Twitter had innocent responses. I am sure it is just the popularity of Facebook that causes all these ills to be described to it while the others are getting less attention.  But there is hope. I looked at Google on - social networking causes - and found it linked to depression (and nothing else).

I ask on April 1 if Google will make us stupid? That post was based a real question Pew asked in its future of the internet survey.  I said no then and will also say the Facebook and social networking are not the culprits here, just the people who use them.  Google will only make us stupid if we simply accept what we find there. 

Comments

[ChrisCD]

No, Facebook doesn't cause these things, but many who are already plagued by them flock to it and the problems are exhaserbated (spelling?) Facebook allows people who are depressed to hide and withdraw further.

It doesn't cause jealousy. The problem of mistrust, not feeling like your getting enough attention is already there. Again it must magnifies it.

A better question, Can Social Media offer solutions instead of magnification? I did notice that Facebook tries to get you to connect with friends that you haven't "shared" with in a while.

For "healthy" people social media is fun. I enjoyed sending gifts to my friends from my silly games. I finally decided that the games took too much time and I would rather spend that time interacting through the posts. Of course some real interaction would be best.

I think it magnifies good things more, but good rarely sells in the media. Media likes to focus on the negative.

Will Google make us stupid, no. Again, it just magnifies a growing problem where people don't think through things on their own and want to be spoon fed.

Anyway, sorry for being so long.

[bill Ives]

Chris - Thanks for your excellent comment - the longer the better. Bill