How do social networking sites affect human behavior?
March 11th, 2009. Filed under: Behavioral Health.
By: Maiken Scott
mscott@whyy.org
The amount of time people spend on social networking sites like Facebook increased dramatically in the past year - this according to a new Nielsen report.
The total time spent online rose by 18% in 2008, while time spent on ‘Member Community’ sites was up 63%.
How do these sites affect people’s mental health? From WHYY’s Behavioral Health desk, Maiken Scott reports:
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Transcript:
For psychologists, the Nielsen report poses as many questions as it answers. Temple University’s Dr. Frank Farley says he is observing a dramatic shift in human behavior:
Farley: Towards self revelation toward towards dis-inhibition towards letting it all hang out - how is that going to change us?
One concern is that loneliness will increase as people spend more time online - but Stanford researcher Dr. BJ Fogg says we’ll become more sophisticated in distinguishing different forms of relationships:
Fogg: We’ll understand that I can connect to hundreds of people and those are weak ties or light-weight relationships and I still have very good friends and very close relationships and I’m using the same tool but I just use it in a different way.
Facebook users have an average of 281 friends in their network.
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