A comment on the study itself, if you're here just for discussion around Facebook please move on:
I think the results of these study are not necessarily surprising. Perhaps the most intriguing bit is this:
> This observation, and the fact that people were more emotionally positive in response to positive emotion updates from their friends, stands in contrast to theories that suggest viewing positive posts by friends on Facebook may somehow affect us negatively, for example, via social comparison (6, 13).
Which I think should be looked at more closely.
Yet, I mean, hasn't this been assumed/understood to be the case about media we consume for a while (the fact it affects our emotional state?) A quick search seems to support the claim that it is widely understood that TV has the same effect [1], and I think it's been known (or at least assumed) for a while that the emotional content of other broadcasting media can have deep effect on our emotional state. During the War radio and posters were used to keep populations calm (ie, "Keep Calm and Carry On") or angry. Today Fox News, CNN (most media companies actually) try to keep you scared and mad.
I'd say in that sense the results are not very surprising, though it's interesting to think of this in the context of the internet, because internet communication is two-way and and actors are small. Rather than being a single big broadcaster reaching all nodes, social networks are more federated and clique-y. This could imply a self-enforcing network effect. If the network's collective feelings affect each individual's, it's not hard to imagine the effective reduced positivity further worsening the mood of the collective in a vicious cycle, or the opposite. The same "rich gets richer" effect should apply for positive emotions too.
Idk, I personally thing that's kinda crazy, and would like to learn more about it, where the critical points lie, and how these effects might spread across a broader network. Would the positive and negative one tend to cancel each other out?
If you look at Figure 1, I have to wonder if the difference seen in the chart on quadrant one (Positive words / Positivity reduced) being larger than the delta on the other charts means anything for this natural evolution and network effect. Is this just an artifact of the way things are measured, or does it go deeper into our psyche?
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full
A comment on the study itself, if you're here just for discussion around Facebook please move on:
I think the results of these study are not necessarily surprising. Perhaps the most intriguing bit is this:
> This observation, and the fact that people were more emotionally positive in response to positive emotion updates from their friends, stands in contrast to theories that suggest viewing positive posts by friends on Facebook may somehow affect us negatively, for example, via social comparison (6, 13).
Which I think should be looked at more closely.
Yet, I mean, hasn't this been assumed/understood to be the case about media we consume for a while (the fact it affects our emotional state?) A quick search seems to support the claim that it is widely understood that TV has the same effect [1], and I think it's been known (or at least assumed) for a while that the emotional content of other broadcasting media can have deep effect on our emotional state. During the War radio and posters were used to keep populations calm (ie, "Keep Calm and Carry On") or angry. Today Fox News, CNN (most media companies actually) try to keep you scared and mad.
I'd say in that sense the results are not very surprising, though it's interesting to think of this in the context of the internet, because internet communication is two-way and and actors are small. Rather than being a single big broadcaster reaching all nodes, social networks are more federated and clique-y. This could imply a self-enforcing network effect. If the network's collective feelings affect each individual's, it's not hard to imagine the effective reduced positivity further worsening the mood of the collective in a vicious cycle, or the opposite. The same "rich gets richer" effect should apply for positive emotions too.
Idk, I personally thing that's kinda crazy, and would like to learn more about it, where the critical points lie, and how these effects might spread across a broader network. Would the positive and negative one tend to cancel each other out?
If you look at Figure 1, I have to wonder if the difference seen in the chart on quadrant one (Positive words / Positivity reduced) being larger than the delta on the other charts means anything for this natural evolution and network effect. Is this just an artifact of the way things are measured, or does it go deeper into our psyche?
Idk, just thoughts.
[1]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1...