Muise, Amy. "More Information than You Ever Wanted: Does Facebook Bring Out the Green-Eyed Monster of Jealousy?" CyberPsychology and Behavior 12.4 (2009): 441-44. EBSCOhost. Mary Ann Leibert, Inc. Web. 13 Sept. 2010. <http://web.ebscohost.com....>.
Response to: "More Information than You Ever Wanted: Does Facebook Bring Out the Green-Eyed Monster of Jealousy?"
The article addresses the issue of jealousy in romantic relationships and how it is encouraged by Facebook use. Muise argues that Facebook provides a visual of our partners' interactions with their social groups, which wouldn't otherwise have been available to us. Stemming from this increased visibility, people in young relationships may find cause for concern with their partner's social activity, such as poking, wall posts, and adding friends. The research finds that people who were the jealous type before Facebook also tended to be more jealous on Facebook (obviously), but also said that people who spent more time on Facebook were significantly more likely to be jealous of their partners' interactions as well.
The reasons suggested to be behind this trend were 1) "accessibility of information," 2) "relationship jealousy," 3) "Facebook as an addiction," and 4) "lack of context." (p. 443) All of these factors together contributed to the highest rates of Facebook-inspired jealousy within a relationship, but it wasn't able to be determined whether more time spent on Facebook was causing the jealousy or if jealousy was encouraging more time spent on Facebook. Muise suspects that the two are so intertwined that they feed into each other and create a loop of jealous Facebooking activity. A large factor in Facebook jealousy may be the information found about partners' friends: "78.9% reported that their partner has added previous romantic or sexual partners as friends. Almost all of the participants in the current sample (92.1%) reported that their partner was at least somewhat likely to have Facebook friends who they do not know. (p 442)"
I would certainly recommend this article to my peers who are experiencing Facebook jealousy, because my friends and I are the generation this article was investigating. It's a problem I have experienced firsthand and know to be an issue in several of my friends' relationships, and wasn't a problem before Facebook became such a large part of our lives. The article's suggestion that time spent on Facebook correlates to the levels of Facebook jealousy could serve as a solution to the problem as well, assuming that the users are capable of limiting their time on Facebook despite the addiction. Breaking down the possible reasons that Facebook causes jealousy may allow future participants in young relationships to realize the destructive power Facebook has.
While I do agree with the article's point that Facebook is responsible for much jealousy in young relationships, I also believe that it's a valuable tool, and one that our generation won't soon give up. It has been argued that Facebook is devaluing real life (offline) social networking because we don't have to go through the traditional process of meeting and talking to someone to find out personal details, but I argue that Facebook is immensely useful for making relationships deeper because it provides information we may not have discovered about that acquaintance, expanding my social web. Would I have known my new friend's birthday if I hadn't Facebook friended her?
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