News Study links number of Facebook friends to stress levels

* 12 per cent of respondents said that Facebook made them feel anxious

At work ? Do some bloodyt work shirkers !

LoL

dunx

P.S. What is farceburke anyway ?

 

A website/webspace, a small CMS (lot's of free CMS outthere if you can't code one yourself), a mailinglist and a RSS-feed... nothing else needed actually and 100% under my control.
I can share links/pictures/etc with everyone I want to and I don't need a 3rd-party like Facebook making money by selling off my data and information to achieve this.

 

I have never felt the need to do any of those things. No wonder I never 'got' Facebook.

Though most of the people I know who spend inordinate amounts of time on Facebook do so just to play those stupid time-sink games.

 

I get sick of hearing about bloody Facebook! I've never used it and have no interest in using it which means that is one less stress causer to worry about!

 

I have a facebook account and it does not stress me.

 

I have no facebook account and it does not stress me.
email+phone+face to face = more than enough social interaction for me

 

Wow, there's a load of miserable people in this thread. I'm pretty sure that if people don't like Facebook, it's because they don't get it. You can pick and choose what you want out of it, so dismissing it as an entirety because of a couple of features is short-sighted.

As Joe says, facebook is an excellent way of doing many things.

1. Sharing photos. It's better than flickr or picasa because more people have it, it's better integrated with an address book system/privacy settings and the comments system is good as well.
2. Organising/finding events: if you're a student it's much easier to join a club/society's facebook page that has an integrated calendar than it is to sign up to dozens of mailing lists and transcribe events to your own google calendar/whatever.
3. Sharing links/thoughts with people you know. People come to bit-tech's general forum to share things they like with strangers. If you don't mind something being public, or you think others would find it interesting, posting it on a friend's wall is better than emailing/IMing it to them.

There are plenty more examples, and as tristanperry pointed out, if you don't like someone, you can just hide/get rid of them.

 

ROFL, this makes my day. I'm not surprised by these findings tbh, but it does amuse me.

+1 I never 'got' Facebook either, and I havn't looked back once since I deactivated my account.

 

I use FB for keeping in contact with friends and family. I don't find it stressful at all
It can also be useful in keeping up to date with certain companys or products if you feel inclined to add/like their page. There once was a time I wasted time on the games there, but that fascination wore off long ago.

 

So, any link to the actual study?

Sample size, statistical significance yada yada yada.

No? Hm, wonder why.

I don't do facebook, I see my friends.

 

I wonder how much of that is stress having parents as facebook "friends"?

Having your mother see your updates about how you got drunk at a bar and picking up an equally drunk bimbo must be kinda stressing...

Then again if you're the kind of idiot that tells people how wasted you were the night before via facebook then that probably wouldn't bother you that much.

 

The only thing I get is that facebook wants to make profit by using my details like any other of those so called "social" networks.

Sharing fotos on flickr is better, becasue you don't need a flickr-account to see the photos. Putting the fotos on your own server is even better, as not all people will stumble upon them there, but only those you want them to see.

Privacy settings on facebook can be circumvented as shown a dozen of times allready, they're total crap tbh.

What a crap university you go to, that your university hasn't a calender on their site for all these events?

Nobody needs to give facebook any sort of that information to get it organized just as easy in other ways.

Sharing links with people I know can be done in a ton of other ways, it's nothing that would make facebook special.

---

Oh, and before there was the internet, we all managed to organize events and parties just aswell, and we had even better social contacts then most people have today using facebook.
And how many of the people you're "friends" with in facebook you meet in reallife and know if you really like them or not?

Facebook does offer nothing that would justify to give them your details, which they use to make money from.
I don't give away any details to websites (other then a few trusted eShops) or forums. No realnames, no address, no birthday, no nothing. And I sure won't post fotos of me all over the internet.

Big companies use profilers these days to look up for dirty laundry of their apprentices who apply for a job, and if you happen to have a facebook-account (or somethig else like this) with a picture of you being drunk for example, then say good bye to your job.

And for the stress.... All my phones or PCs have a button to turn them off, and if I don't want to be available, then I simply aren't available to anyone.
Alot of people in these social networks get stressed, because they fear to miss something, as it would be about life and death

 

I use it everday, don't post a lot, buy it's almost always sitting there open, easy way of finding out a friends news or whatever, quite good for keeping track of events etc.

 

What FB items give me stresh:
1) Useless and pointless games that other people force upon me to buy their treasurers, cakes and other worthless stuff.
2) People wanting me to press a button about (fill in any type of useless pointless quiz like thing)
3) The uninteresting adds on the right side that wont stay away if you click "Uninteresting, Misleading, Offensive and Repetitive" a hundred times.

For the rest its ok somewhat.

 

I guess I don't have enough friends to feel stressed

The stress of not being stressed by a surplus of friends is really stressful.

 

My biggest gripe with facebook is that I can't be bothered to use it often enough. I only really end up using it to contact friends which I don't see regularly, and then I forget to check for their reply for about 4 days :S

There is definitely pressure to have a 'good' facebook account, but just like the pressure I get from my sisters to not wear jeans and a t-shirt every day, it's not significant

 

Facebook has gotten much better over the years since people stopped going there to play quizzes and annoy everyone with them. It's now all about sharing news worthy information or simply funny videos and pictures. I like it, tbh. The only people I find annoying on it are older people who are still "wowed" by the whole thing and share crap like everyone did in the early days.

Last night I spent an hour and a half talking to a girl I hadn't talked to since 2003. This is what facebook is about and I think it's cool.

 

I dont have a facebook account, and tbh im one of those that doesnt get it, I can honestly count all my true friends on 2 hands, the people i have lost contact with over the years were for a reason (if i wanted to keep in touch id have made the effort then). So why look them up years later.

Yes i suppose im a bit of a loner, but i like it this way, Imo those that get anxious/stressed is because they feel the need to keep everybody happy.

I can see the useful side of facebook, its just not for me and i wish people wouldnt think im odd because i dont have an account!

 

log on, read message quickly, log off before anyone can initiate chat - job done.

 

perhaps some of the stressed-out people have exceeded their dunbar number?
"theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

maybe past a certain number of "friends" things would start to feel more superficial and therefore less managable from a "soft skills" perspective?

i find it interesting that people feel anxious about getting friend requests from a social networking site and would like more info specifically. is it because they share personal details that they wouldn't want a "new" friend to know? there's a work-around for that. i wonder if some who feel anxious don't really want to use the site at all, but feel some peer pressure? or perhaps just don't know how to use it to best meet their personal social networking needs? which would mean determining those needs in the first place of course.

plus, relationship building requires effort (both on and offline) and for some, when it comes to something like facebook, that may just be too much work for too little payoff (anxiety)?