Devonte Ragsdale
@02670425
Envy on Facebook
There is a tremendous amount of material shared on social networks each day. Facebook is the largest of all the social networks with a whopping 30 billion pieces of information uploaded ach month. Social networks have been linked to many negative feelings including, but not limited to: depression, jealousy, social tension, and social overload. Krasnova et al conducted research to attempt to explain the relationship between passive following on social networks and life satisfaction. Two different studies were conducted. The first studied the scale, scope, and nature of envious emotions related to Facebook use. The second study observed the role of envy and how it affects passive following on FB and life satisfaction. 584 Facebook users took online surveys, answering questions regarding emotions experienced while on and after using Facebook. Researchers asked open and closed-ended questions. The first question asked participants how they felt after they used Facebook. Researchers found that 46% of the sample reported positive feelings and the majority of negative emotions (36.9%) were boredom, anger, frustration. Envy was at the bottom of the list with only 1.2% of users admitting to it. The experimenters believed that people were reluctant to admit to being envious as it is socially unacceptable to envy others. The second question was asked as a general question rather than a direct question; what causes others to feel frustration on Facebook? Envy was the most frequent answer as 30% of the sample attributed envy as the cause of other people’s frustration. Question three was also worded as a general inquiry; what causes other people to feel envy on Facebook? Travel and leisure posts were linked to envy on FB (56.3%), social interaction was the second highest at 14.1%. The study found that envy is the mediator between passive following on social network sites and life dissatisfaction.
The research conducted was formulated with reliability and validity being major concerns. Two independent coders were trained to code the responses of the participants. That allowed the researchers to measure Inter-Code Reliability according to Cohen’s kappa. Relevance, however, is a factor to be considered. All of the participants claimed Germany as their country. Germany’s norms may be completely different from American norms and things that spark envy in Germany may not affect an average American Facebook user at all.
There was also no time table to project how long after logging off of Facebook do feelings of envy persist. A way to improve this study would be to conduct it while users are on Facebook rather than ask them once they’ve logged off. The maturation effect could have taken place between the time the user last used Facebook and was given the survey. The last two questions were formed to ask why other people feel the way they do, but the researcher recorded the answers as if the participants were answering from personal perspectives The questions could have instead asked: What causes frustration while on Facebook? Why does envy occur on Facebook? By shaping the questions in a way to get participant’s feelings on others and using that information as personal responses decreases the value of the answers. If the participants were aware that the questions were personal rather than hypothetical a completely different set of answers could have been given. After envy was the least frequently chosen emotion, the researchers focused questions around the subjects still. While coders were trained specifically for this project, what did their training consist of and how much of their training was dedicated to pinpointing the keywords the scientists wanted?
After reading the press articles, I felt as if social networks were killing people. The articles did overstate the problem and only briefly touched on the many positive effects of social networks. Envy, anger, and frustration only made up a small part of the responses given by facebook users. There are is nothing that everyone likes and I don’t think that everything is worth writing a story about. The link between life satisfaction and passive following should not exist. People have been depressed and angry for many years and a new website s hardly to blame. How many of the envious and depressed users were jealous and angry at the word before Facebook? Is getting rid of social networks the cure for these emotions? These are questions I asked myself after reading the articles because so much of the information was about the negative ties to social networks. After reading the journals I found that the articles embellished most of the story to gain readers’ interest and it worked.
The power of the media great and sometimes people are fooled into believing that everything they read is all true. The press articles I read, while the information I read was somewhat relevant to the journals, made the issues bigger than they actually were. Social networks are sites that people join voluntarily. Social networks are not responsible for the way people feel, people are. The solutions in the article to avoid these negative feelings were to (1) not add people that may be envy-worthy, (2) hide posts from certain friends, or (3) reduce time on the networks altogether. The solutions were followed by reasons why people won’t test out the suggestions. People are afraid of the tensions that may arise with the rejection of a friendship request. Hiding users may result in missing out on key events and dates. Reducing time on platforms may also be problematic because social networks are used to keep people up-to-date. The press article grabbed my attention because I had decided to take a hiatus from social networks because I was never sure why I was on them. The articles were helpful as they provided a lot of information that I found to be true when I was on Facebook and Twitter. While there was a lot of learning, I also realized that when people read stories they tend to stop at that article and use that for all arguments. It is very important to look other documents to reference because once I began to look for other articles related to my primary press exert, I found more detailed information. I also learned to refresh my resources because information does change over time and new research can change or devalue old research. When translating journals into press articles it is important to give equal sides of a story. My first article only highlighted negativity and led me to believe that nothing but negativity came from those sites. The journal included vital information that may have changed my attitude toward the entire project. I learned that newspapers will often misstate things just to sell more papers or gain more interest. Everything on the internet is not credible and it is important, as a researcher, to provide as much factual information as possible and to eliminate bias when communicating findings.

I have requested help several times to get help with APA formatting and citing sources but I have yet to receive it. I will include my articles and journal once again just to avoid plagiarism accusations. I apologize for this version of my paper and my failure to submit this earlier my last computer was supposed to be fixed by now and I still have my original first draft on it. My final paper will be an edited version of that paper if it gets fixed in time.