Why We Can't Quit Facebook: Experts Say The Lure Of Judging Our Friends Is Just Too Pleasurable

• Study found we continue to use Facebook to 'silently watch' friends behaviour
• Found we may even take pleasure from judging them

Facebook recently announced that it now has over 2 billion monthly users.

This makes its 'population' larger than that of China, the US, Mexico and Japan combined.

Its popularity, and with it the influence it has in society, is beyond dispute.



The team found we continue to use the site even though it often annoys or offends us to silently watch friends – and perhaps even take pleasure from judging them

THE JAYDEN PRANK

A long-running hoax has resurfaced among Facebook users, urging them not to accept friend requests from an account called Jayden K Smith.

The well-meaning message warns friends and family that Jayden K Smith is a hacker who will gain access to your account if you accept their invitation.

It says Smith is a hacker who 'has the system connected to your Facebook account'.

Although some users of the site do add strangers for nefarious purposes, in this particular case the chain message is a prank.

But instead of challenging them or severing ties, we continue to use Facebook to silently watch them – and perhaps even take pleasure from judging them.

In other words, Facebook reflects the dynamics at the heart of all real human relationships.

Just as in their offline life, people try to open up and bond with each other while simultaneously having to cope with the everyday frictions of friendship.

One of the most notable things we found in our research was the high number of people who said that they were frequently offended by what their friends posted.

The sorts of things that caused offence ran the gamut from extremist or strongly-held political opinions (racism, homophobia, partisan political views) to oversharing of daily routines and acts of inadvertent self-promotion.



Facebook recently announced that it now has over 2 billion monthly users. This makes its 'population' larger than that of China, the US, Mexico and Japan combined.

For example, one interviewee wrote of how she had 'a particularly hard time with pro-gun posts':

'I really, really wish guns were significantly less accessible and less glorified in American culture. Still, I don’t think Facebook is really the place that people chose to listen to opposing views, so I usually ignore posts of that nature.'

At the other end of the spectrum was this interviewee:

'I wrote to a friend about how my two-year-old was counting to 40 and was saying the alphabet in three languages. This made a Facebook contact write passive aggressively on her wall about overachieving parents who spend all their time bragging about their children. I felt the need to de-friend her after that incident.'

The reason these reactions happened so often was due to various factors native to the sort of communications technology that Facebook represents.



Facebook forces us to mix with by people from different parts of your life being brought together in one space

First, there's the specific type of diversity that exists among people's online networks.

That is, the diversity created by people from different parts of your life being brought together in one space.

On Facebook, you write your message without knowing who precisely will read it, but in the knowledge that the likely audience will include people from various parts of your life who have a range of different values and beliefs.

In face-to-face conversations you're likely to talk to you father-in-law, work colleagues or friends from primary school in separate contexts, using different styles of communication.

Whereas on Facebook they'll all see the same side of you, as well as getting to see the opinions of those you associate with.

This means that people are engaging in personal conversations in a much more public space than they did before, and that the different value systems these diverse friends have can very easily come into conflict.

But the nature of the ties people have on Facebook means that often they can't just break loose from people they find annoying or offensive in this way.

For example, if a work colleague or relative offends you, there are likely to be reasons of duty or familial responsibility which mean you won't want to de-friend them. Instead, people make discreet changes in their settings on the site to limit the views they find offensive from showing up in their feed, without provoking outward shows of conflict with people.

As one interviewee explained: 'I remember de-friending one person (friend of a friend) as she kept posting her political opinions that were the complete opposite of mine. It frustrated me as I didn’t know her well enough to “bite” and reply to her posts, equally, I didn’t want to voice it on a public forum.'

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