Social Comparison On Facebook: A Facebook World

A Facebook World In today’s digital age, social media sites like Facebook play a large role in how people communicate with one another. Facebook has made possible a previously unavailable form of socialization, enabling its users to share their lives and opinions with one another through comments and pictures. Facebook users can friend people they see infrequently or have never met in person, which makes the user become increasingly reliant on the Facebook profiles of their friends for an understanding of their lives, and by extension an understanding of the community of people they are in contact with through Facebook. As socializing moves online and is done less in person, people’s understanding of one another is increasingly based off Facebook

Although this comparison is not deliberate, when users view their own profile next to the profiles of their family, friends, acquaintances, and anyone else they have friended, it is inevitable that comparison will occur. The article “Social comparison on Facebook: Its antecedents and psychological outcomes” discusses how people use Facebook for social comparison. The article is from the journal of Computers in Human Behavior. It was shown in this article that intensive Facebook use is associated with frequent social comparison with Facebook friends, and that the more social comparisons people make, the higher the levels of anxiety and depression they have. Comparison is a way in which people self evaluate themselves, and this self evaluation affects their self esteem. When people compare themselves to the carefully selected photos and posts that have been designed by other users to highlight the best of themselves and their lives, this comparison hurts the user’s self esteem. The article “Do Our Facebook Friends Make Us Feel Worse? A Study of Social Comparison and Emotion” is from the journal of Human Communication Research and discusses how people compare themselves to their Facebook friends which can lower their self esteem. “Through interviews and lab experiments, their study found that participants who were exposed to superior profile pictures showed fewer positive emotions and were less satisfied with their own bodies than those who were exposed to inferior profile photos,” (Carcioppolo, Li, Liu, and North). This citation supports my argument that Facebook can make us feel worse about ourselves. People comparing themselves to the picture perfect profiles of others on Facebook begin to perceive inadequacies in themselves. When before they were content with their summer vacation plans, they see an acquaintance’s pictures of a scuba