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How readers use Facebook

Brian Leiter

In a bit less than 24 hours, we got about 400 responses to the poll on how readers use Facebook; here are the results:

Which of the following best describes how you use Facebook?  
Selection   Votes 
Almost entirely for sharing personal stuff: photos, family news, etc.  37% 149 
Almost entirely for professoinal purposes: networking, sharing my work, intellectual interchange  2% 8 
Almost entirely as my political platform: sharing my political opinions and outrage, news, op-eds  2% 9 
A mix of personal, professional, and political  22% 89 
Mostly personal, some of the others  28% 113 
Mostly professional, some of the others  4% 15 
Mostly political, some of the others  4% 15 
398 total 

 A couple of readers wrote to say they don't use Facebook at all ("it's evil" said one philosopher!).  I have to say that it's not the case that one-third of my FB friends use it "almost entirely for sharing personal stuff."  In any case, comments are open for folks to opine about why they avoid Facebook, or about how they use it, or about what they make of these results and so on.  (Folks who commented at the poll site should feel free to repost their comments here.)

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11 responses to “How readers use Facebook”

  1. s.wallerstein

    I don't have Facebook.

    I had it for a short while maybe 6 or 7 years ago. From reading the Facebook posts of friends and family members, it seemed to blur the distinction between our public and our private lives, which I didn't feel good or comfortable about.

    People would post stuff about their private lives, but for public consumption. What they said about their private lives didn't ring true to me, didn't seem authentic, undoubtedly because they knew that anyone could be reading it.

    When I talk about my private life or thoughts to close friends or family members, I open up, I reveal stuff about my life and about my opinions that I wouldn't want the world in general to know. On the other hand, I have a set of public opinions which are political, designed for the public realm. I also have a public image which I cultivate, but I reserve the right to be a bit weirder, more perverse and more malicious in private.

    I keep two or maybe more sets of books. That gives my life more spice.

    Reply
  2. Tim O'Keefe

    A former colleague of mine would advise our incoming graduate students to get off social media in order to improve their productivity and happiness. I'm not sure that that's the right advice, but it sounds plausible to me. Although I haven't looked into it in detail to assess how solid it is, I know that there is a fair amount of research into the impact FB has on well-being. Here is a summary of a recent study with links to some other research:

    https://hbr.org/2017/04/a-new-more-rigorous-study-confirms-the-more-you-use-facebook-the-worse-you-feel

    Reply
  3. Jacob Seeley

    I had Facebook for many years but got rid of it after college. I was part of the first wave of adolescents for whom Facebook was a feature of the majority of their formative teenage life. I jumped ship because it felt like most people in my social circle, myself included, fell in to one of three camps, none of which I wanted to be a part of.

    (A) you have Facebook but barely used it.

    At this point I'd rather not have the my information on display. I think Facebook has some costs to it, which aren't worth bearing if it isn't used much.

    (B) you use Facebook but almost exclusively to use its free messaging service and to keep up with the lives of acquaintances.

    This was all well and good until the messenger app started to record your every-day speech and generally farm you for data. Not sure if that still goes on. As for keeping up with acquaintances, you begin to wonder why you care what Joe Bloggs is getting up to (usually something Very Impressive or Extremely Cultured). You then wonder what the point of Facebook is once you realise that the majority of your friends list is acquaintances, and that you can catch-up with your real friends in-person without Facebook.

    (C) you use Facebook regularly.

    Regular users then seemed to do one of two not-great things (myself included); either embarrassingly over-share, or present extremely curated "highlights only" versions of themselves. Neither, in my experience, was conducive of general mental well-being.

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  4. Anon PhD

    Completely agree. With regard to other PhD students and the few philosophy professors I'm "friends" with, the vast majority of "content" posted is self-serving and poorly reasoned moral grandstanding. I find it disgusting and unhealthy for the discipline.

    Reply
  5. Jonathan Surovell

    I agree with most of these comments and would add a couple small points:

    – The study Tim O'Keefe cites should be viewed in the context of a well-established negative correlation between FB use and happiness. The research, considered in its entirety, establishes a clear presumption that FB use reduces happiness. This presumption could be overturned by further research, but until then, the prudent thing to do is to deactivate one's FB account.

    – Others have claimed that FB isn't a useful source of information on current events, etc. I think it's at best unclear that acquiring information through FB is useful. In addition to creating echo chambers and facilitating groupthink, it's possible that FB contributes to a kind of unhealthy, compulsive information consumption that diminishes creativity and deep thinking. Emma Seppälä, a psychologist at Stanford, has raised this possibility in connection with smartphone/tablet use generally. I don't claim that this theory should be a default presumption, as should the thesis that FB makes us less happy. But neither should the claim that it's good to use FB to stay "informed".

    https://qz.com/978018/happiness-research-shows-the-biggest-obstacle-to-creativity-is-being-too-busy/?utm_source=qzfb

    http://bigthink.com/21st-century-spirituality/creativity-and-distraction

    Reply
  6. Daniel A. Kaufman

    Most of the people I know use it to maintain their relationships with friends and family. I do not.

    I would not think it acceptable to maintain my relationships by posting generic flyers up on bus stations all over town, and all that Facebook is, is a virtual version of that. Maintaining one's relationships should at least involve (a) some effort and (b) personal communication or else I question whether one really has those relationships to begin with.

    Most of my family lives in Israel. Back in the 1970s and 80s, we sent each other letters and talked on the phone, even though the latter was expensive and there was a language barrier. My grandmother spoke neither English nor Hebrew, but only Hungarian. I can still remember her spidery script and her efforts to try and communicate with me, despite the language barrier. Indeed, they are some of my fondest memories of her.

    Today, it's all Facebook, and I lament it terribly. I felt more connected to my relatives talking with them on the phone once a month and receiving a letter at about the same frequency, then I do today, reading their daily or weekly generic Facebook updates.

    I feel like we are using technology not to enhance our personal relationships but to destroy them, and Facebook has been one of the worst culprits.

    Reply
  7. HS Teacher

    I was at an elite university when that was Facebook's target audience, so I've been there for every stage of its evolution. I first joined because I was missing party invitations and people would share links to music they were listening to. It was fun to have a college-only environment to share pictures of your drinking adventures and plan new ones. What an innocent time.

    Teaching high school in Silicon Valley, I can tell you that Facebook is in decline. High schoolers may have an account, but their parents and family members got there first, so they rarely use it. They know they can't "be kids" online, so they prefer the consequence-free environment of Snapchat.

    As for me, I've had to deactivate all the incriminating photos and immature posts that made Facebook fun in the first place. And despite having hundreds of friends, the same ten or so people dominate the newsfeed with bad journalism. And now my mother wants to friend me. All of us are using it less.

    To me, now, it's a glorified address book. It does help me keep in contact with old friends when I'm in their town or the like, but it's just not fun anymore.

    Reply
  8. VL Brandt

    Brooklyn College philosopher Samir Chopra recently published a very insightful essay on how FB is training us, over at 3QuarksDaily: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2017/09/social-media-and-the-training-of-our-minds.html. To pick up where S. Wallerstein left off: "The structure and features of social media systems are set up to shift a great deal of communication, previously imagined to be private, to public spaces, available for inspection by your ‘friends,’ all in the name of ‘sharing.’ These systems set out to provide a means of social networking and communication with an architecture designed to induce behavior in its users that would violate conventional privacy norms. For instance, Facebook’s default options were set for maximum information exposure and changing them required opting out via a complicated, cumbersome interface. This has had precisely the effect its designers had in mind: user behavior observed on Facebook established new social norms for information sharing, which then facilitated the conclusion the modern social networker was not as concerned with privacy as his forebears. This conclusion in hand, Facebook could defend itself against the charge it violated the privacy of its users by pointing to their behavior. The trap had been set; Facebook users walked right into it."

    Reply
  9. Charles Pigden

    I use Facebook primarily to keep up with family and friends, particularly my grown-up children. I like to know what they have been doing and thinking and I often enjoy the pics. If a friend of mine has photographed something beautiful or of historical interest, then I am up for it. If they have done something interesting or fun ditto. What I enjoy above all is a ‘restricted’ page on which my daughter posts updates about my grandson. I also like (‘enjoy’ is not the right word) the way that Facebook enables you to express your sympathy for absent friends in cases of misfortune. I am a bit lazy about posting myself, perhaps because, although like most people I am fairly self-interested, I am not all interested in my self, and I don’t expect other people to be interested in me either. But in so far as I do post it’s mostly about things I have seen or things I have done, usually of a personal nature (If I were a cat-lover there would definitely be pictures of my cats.) As for expressing my opinions, there are plenty of other venues to do that (for example, this one) so there isn’t much opining on my Facebook page, though I might post a political joke if it is sufficiently funny. As for networking, I don’t think it worth the effort and the best way to advance my professional career (in so far as that is an objective for me) is to write stuff worth reading and to get it published. BUT I do use Facebook for ONE political purpose. I use to it repost petitions, appeals etc from organizations like Amnesty, Avaaz and a couple of trade union solidarity groups to which I belong. These are ‘many a mickle makes a muckle ‘ affairs; the more people sign on, the more likely it is that the wrong will be righted or the prisoner released. So if I repost an appeal and some of my friends (or even some of my ‘friends’) see it and sign, this makes it marginally more likely that some poor sod will get out of jail or will stop being victimized by Walmart or whatever. However, there are narrow windows of opportunity for such petitions; if people don’t sign up in a week or so, their signatures will cease to be effective. So I try to remember to take them down after a couple of weeks, partly because nobody is going to be very interested in visiting my page if it is entirely clogged up with defunct appeals, which means that the appeals themselves will be less effective. If there aren’t too many extant appeals, hopefully visitors will come because they are interested in me but will stay to do their thirty second bits in righting the wrong du jour. So I’m in the ‘mostly personal but some of the other stuff’ category, though I foolishly ticked the wrong box in the survey.

    Reply
  10. Phil

    I'm in a couple of social groups that communicate in part through Fb, so I'm on there through fear of missing out. I can't say I like it. It does seem to foster a weird combination of over- and under-sharing – you tell the unknown hundreds about your job worries/pangs of nostalgia/upcoming surgery, in the same confessional tone you'd use to speak to a close friend or an empty room, but you respond to other people's outpourings with bland positivity or not at all. This is all, thankfully, quarantined from the working day. I did at one point set up a second Fb page for academic networking/timekilling, but I rarely look at it, and my sense is that most of the people I initially linked to are also fairly intermittent users.

    Reply
  11. Second-Year Grad

    I recently deleted (not just "deactivated") Facebook for this exact reason. Quitting it genuinely feels like giving up nicotine (lots of "fomo"), but the benefits are similarly palpable. I highly recommend it for any grads feeling blue.

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