Reading remains a gateway to learning and personal development, making the study of books indispensable in contemporary society.
“Are the knowledgeable and the ignorant equal? In fact, none will take heed except the people of understanding.”(Qur’an; 39:9).
“The heart of him who has understanding seeks knowledge, but the mouths of fools feed on folly.”(Proverbs 15:14).
Think you have 1000, 750, 500 or 200 friends based on your Facebook connections? Think again.
A new study has revealed that it's impossible to have more than 150 friends.
The 150 limit, known as "Dunbar's Number", was named after British professor and study author Robin Dunbar.
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"The 150-layer is the important one: this defines the people you have real reciprocated relationships with, those where you feel obligations and would willingly do favours," the scientist explained to AFP.
The study also looked at the different boundaries within friends circles on the online social media site.
According to the professor, we tend to have five intimate friends, 15 best friends, 50 good friends, 150 friends, 500 acquaintances and 1500 people we can recognise on the site.
"People can [and sometimes do] have 500 or even 1000 friends on Facebook, but all they are doing is including people who we would normally call acquaintances or people we just recognise by sight but don't know very well," he said.
The study, which had a total of 3375 participants, both male and female between 18 and 65, reported that when participants were asked how many "genuine" friends they had, there was an average of 27.6 per cent. But when asked how many would be there in a crisis, the number dropped dramatically to a mere four friends.
The study also found that these numbers stayed the same regardless of the number of Facebook friends one had.
"Respondents who had unusually large networks did not increase the numbers of close friendships they had but, rather, added more loosely defined acquaintances into their friendship circle simply because most social media sites do not allow one to differentiate between these layers."
The study also made it clear to note there is a trend that younger individuals are starting to move away from Facebook and use other forms of social media instead.
"There has been a notable tendency for teenagers to move away from using Facebook as a social environment and to make use of media like Snapchat, WeChat, Vine, Flickr and Instagram," Dunbar said.
There were 86 per cent of individuals in the 18 to 29 age category on Facebook in 2013, but by 2015 this dropped to 82 per cent.
Alternatively, 2013 saw 35 per cent of those 65+ using Facebook with an increase to 48 per cent in 2015.
"What appears to be the most seminal moment in a young person's decision to leave Facebook was surely that dreaded day your mum sends you a friend request," reported Lead Anthropologist at the University College London, Daniel Miller.
"Mostly they feel embarrassed to even be associated with it."
With the increase of social media and its users all around the world, face-to-face communication has also decreased, leading to the decay of friendships.
Recent Facebook deactivator Nat Duncan told Fairfax how the pressure of diminishing friendships made her take a step back from the social media giant.
"I left Facebook because it made me feel lonely," she said.
"Facebook made me feel lonely because I could see many (many) 'friends' on my account who I'd like to be (or continue to be) real friends with. I'd begun to notice that the friend's I'd had in the past who'd done this sort of thing (telephone calls, coffee, dinner, even texts and emails) just had gone AWOL on the real friends activity roster.
"They had stopped doing these things because they truly believed they were playing their part in maintaining our friendship by 'liking' a post, commenting on a post, tagging me in a post or worst of all just lurking around my posts knowing what I was doing but not even interacting with the posts."
Dunbar suggests that we still keep up to date with our face-to-face social interactions to prevent these friendships slipping from the "friends" to "acquaintance" zone.
"Friendships, in particular, have a natural decay rate in the absence of contact," he said.
"Face-to-face meetings are required from time to time to prevent friendships, in particular, sliding down through the network layers and eventually slipping over the edge of the 150 layer into the category of acquaintances [the 500 layers] beyond."
So next time you come across that person with hundreds of friends on Facebook, just remember that, like you, they probably only have only a few they can rely on during a time of crisis. But make sure you keep up with face-to-face interactions so you'll still be able to turn to them in a time of need.
http://m.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life/most-of-your-facebook-friends-arent-real-20160125-gmdcht.html
Facebook is annihilating your self-esteem, and you’re not alone
NICO LANG, The Daily Dot
I reactivated my old Facebook account for 15 minutes before realizing I’d made a terrible mistake.
I deleted my profile last year because I didn’t like the person I was when I was on Facebook—or the person that I was pretending to be. If they say that on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog, my experience of Facebook was like being a canine with a keyboard, pretending to be human. In place of feeling connected to those around me, I had “Likes” to do that for me. Being a good “friend” to 2,000 people on the Internet meant I didn’t have to be one in real life.
But like an alcoholic passing a favorite pub, I often get nostalgic for a place where everybody knows my name. I find myself craving a sip of the old social media juice, but this time around, it didn’t taste the same.
The moment I posted to the site, I felt a familiar crushing weight: the nagging unease of waiting for your update—and your existence—to be affirmed by le grand public. When the rush of addiction was gone and the dopamine had worn off, I was left with a deep emptiness, as if this place had been a ghost town all along.
I related this story recently to a friend, who relayed a familiar feeling “When I open Facebook, I can’t help but feel all this anxiety,” he confessed. I asked him what motivated that emotion, and he explained that it was the sheer volume of information—as well as the mass of notifications, event invites, and advertisements. I wondered how common these feelings were: When the benefits of Facebook are stripped away, how many of us all left feeling burdened or overwhelmed by our own social media presence?
Research studies frequently link high amounts of Facebook use with depression, but what’s been less discussed are the feelings of “Facebook anxiety” that many users may experience when interacting with the site. In a 2012 study from Edinburgh Napier University, Dr. Kathy Charles and her team found that 12 percent of the Facebook users they felt anxious or agitated when using the social media platform. Researchers linked a high number of Facebook friends with feeling burdened or stressed out by the site.
In contrast, using platforms like YouTube and LinkedIn produced little to no anxiety.
If controversial manipulation experiments have shown that Facebook has the power to impact your mood, Marissa Maldonado, the director of outreach at Sovereign Health Group, argued that the stress associated with the site can also impact your mental health and self-esteem, as well as your overall well-being and even your ability to sleep properly. One study Maldonado cites found that “two-thirds [of respondents] had difficulty sleeping due to anxiety and other negative emotions after they had used the sites.”
If the prevailing research shows that Facebook anxiety is commonplace, I spoke to a number of Facebook users who reported similar experiences. While many people I spoke with associated positive feelings with the site, others felt anxious or overwhelmed by it.
The mass of information was the primary complaint about the site. One interviewee—who wished to remain anonymous—cited that same “visual” overload as motivating discomfort—“[checking] the news feed, the ticker, the trending topics, wall posts, messages, and everything else.” James Foley, an academic at the New School, adds that the “font of posts is neverending, and the lack of any comprehensive organization or direction to what you are seeing means it’s just a spew of information.”
Skylar Baker-Jordan, a reporter for Chicago’s Windy City Times and a freelancer for the Daily Dot, characterized Facebook as a “chore,” but writer and performer Dana Norris argued that what makes the site often overwhelming is that it can feel like a job. “You have to be funnier and better and more interesting,” she said. “Posting something and receiving no response is horrible, even though it’s likely being suppressed by Facebook metrics.”
Norris’ answer touches on oft-cited feelings of inadequacy inherent in the Facebook experience, feeling “less than” when compared to your friends’ filtered vacation photos. This has often been classified as a form of FOMO—the abbreviation for the fear that everyone is having fun but you—but the stress is more akin to the psychological effects of Photoshop. Whereas research shows that 80 percent of women experience feelings of low self-esteem after viewing fashion magazines, which present a digitized version of perfection, Facebook does the same for our daily lives. Social media curation allows you to present your life with the blemishes airbrushed out.
By playing off its users’ insecurities, Facebook commonly promotes feelings of “competition, envy, and loneliness,” as Norris argued. However, Peter Murphy, the Market Development Coordinator at Midwest Renewable Energy Association, explained that it’s not just false positivity that is the issue but the “preponderance of negativity.” According to Murphy, this is often related to current events and national tragedies in the current news cycle: “My newsfeed reminds me of all the terrible things in the world.”
Curating your feed—by choosing to unfollow Facebook pages or friends that generate negativity—can help alleviate that stress. So can regulating problem behaviors, like spending too much time on the site or “stalking” friends who have enviable social media presences.
However, Foley argues that our desire to lurk and unhealthily peer into the lives of those around us is built into the experience itself. He compares the site to an 18th century “panopticon”—a type of prison that allowed inmates to be viewed by guards at all times. “We know what all the prisoners are showing us from their jail cells,” Foley said.
Not everyone views social media as a restrictive prison, but these statements reflect a growing trend of recognizing the particular emotional toll that sites like Facebook or Twitter can take on users. It might be a full-fledged social media anxiety disorder, an unhealthy addiction, or an unwanted annoyance, but social media is also a choice. Many, like myself, might decide to disconnect themselves entirely, while others may choose to unplug or deactivate the app from their phone. Switching to a “Page” instead of a Profile also helps cut down on the noise.
The anxiety of using Facebook might make you feel lonely, but if you feel stressed out when you open the site, you’re not alone.
Source: http://www.salon.com/2015/12/10/facebook_is_annhilating_your_self_esteem_and_youre_not_alone_partner/
