Does Facebook Make Us Miserable?

I can still remember the night I signed up for Facebook. I joined for less then honorable reasons, an older schoolmate of mine asked me to join to help his cyberbullying campaign of a classmate of his. Like many, I was tentative at first, I didn't have a profile picture and my use was sporadic. Slowly it began invading my life, and today it is perhaps my most visited website(besides this one of course). Facebook has become a monolith, it holds a veritable monopoly on social networking, crushing smaller rivals like Friendster and Myspace. The film about the founding of the site, "The Social Network," was one of last years best reviewed films and received many awards.

Yesterday, a blogger for the Harvard Business Review, Daniel Gulati, asserted that Facebook makes people miserable. Gulati asserts, “Facebook is making us unhappy by making everyone else look really, really happy.” He means that status updates about work promotions, one's love life, and other positive stuff makes one's 'friends' jealous. They have the natural inclination to rank their lives in comparison to their friends online persona, without realizing that said online persona is a highly stylized aspirational caricature.

Gulati goes on to worry about the future of human interaction, "Meeting up in person, you get a much richer connection versus a video chat or a text-based chat. It’s cannibalizing the offline interaction. That’s what’s worrying to me — the future prospect of Facebook conversations and video calls as opposed to meeting up at the local coffee shop.”

To me Gulati's fears seem misplaced, Facebook isn't a website that is intended to serve as the only medium for friendship, but rather as an adjunct to that relationship. Does Gulati truly believe that one day all interaction will take place online, while people never venture outside or congregate in person? Frankly, that seems ridiculous. If anything Facebook is a natural medium to reminisce about things that happened in real life(or irl in internet parlance). It is a good forum for sharing photos and referencing inside jokes, which necessitate a relationship deeper than one conducting only online. In fact the status updates which Gulati sees as a forum for bragging, and subsequently a locus for one to feel their dissatisfactions, are just as often used to quote inane song lyrics, make inside jokes, or, in the age of Twitter, offer pithy witticisms that would otherwise go unheard. This last aspect is where I find Facebook and Twitter so valuable, I get to hear real time insight from close friends or acquaintances, that I would not be privy to without this online forum.

Facebook is largely an aspirational tool, meet a girl you think is cute but are scared to talk to, check out their facebook. In some ways Facebook offers a feeling that enhances real life interaction, a wall post or a like gives me a visceral thrill. Facebook doesn't make people miserable, there are miserable, competitive, or lonely people on Facebook, but do they get a deeper disappointment from seeing pictures of a friend with a new girlfriend, than from seeing the myriads of couples that walk around the real world everyday? To blame the medium seems to me to be an excuse for competitive, antisocial behavior.