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Does Using Facebook Help Your Self-Esteem?

by Will Safer on January 20, 2009 at 05:29 PM

What role does Facebook play in your life? If you use the social networking site, has it replaced your former ways of communicating with friends? Enhanced it? Diminished it?

Those are the questions many Facebook users are asking themselves these days as they spend more time on the site, updating their status, joining groups and, yes, making new friends. But with all that time and virtual interaction, are they losing touch with, well, the human touch?

That's also the question posed by Time.com writer Lisa Selin Davis who asks "Does Facebook Replace Face Time or Enhance It?"

Davis seems to answer the question with a somewhat hedged "enhance," as she tells of old friends reconnecting and admits to learning more about her own friends' activities than she ever did before joining the social networking site.

Of particular interest to us, Davis cites a Michigan State University study of Facebook's effects on undergraduates as stating: "... Facebook usage was found to interact with measures of psychological well-being, suggesting that it might provide greater benefits for users experiencing low self-esteem and low life satisfaction."

Did you catch that? If you've got low self-esteem, Facebook can help you feel better.

By connecting with other people, you "bridge social capital." This doesn't mean people with high self-esteem would have less use for Facebook; they just don't need as much help with their social capital. (Makes sense to us.)

What else did the study reveal?
  • Though having a Facebook account puts you at risk for some privacy abuses those risks are exaggerated -- the upside from your social connections outweighs the risk.
  • Facebook is good for maintaining connections when you move on from one place to another like from high school to college, college to work, or from job to job.
  • The site lets you stay in touch with people even if your "offline" worlds move apart, whether by geography or situation -- and that's a good thing.
[From: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication via Time.com]

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Tags: Facebook, social networking, SocialNetworking, top, web

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