While reading John Bohannon's article Will Facebook make you sad? and Johann Hari's The Likely cause of addiction, there was a similarity between the both that stood out as the main cause as to why people and/or rats either felt sad or fell into an addiction was their environment and whether or not they felt sad. Bohannon wrote about a study by Ethan Kross and Ann Arbor that found that the more a user used Facebook, the sadder the user felt, but their findings also include that in order to have a negative on Facebook, a user must be "passive meaning they look more into what others posts than actively participating in the online community. In other words, the "passive" user of Facebook is a outcast and alone, creating this environment that makes the user believe that they are different from everyone else.
What is very interesting about Hari's article, is how in depth it changes the perception of addiction and how it uses well known historical events such as the Vietnam war and how Americans were affected by their environment leading to an addiction to heroin that was quickly defeated once the surviving soldiers made it back home.
Putting these two pieces together, it would be very interesting to see more people actively participate on Facebook, creating a more positive social environment for themselves, and seeing a positive impact on their emotional state. In this day an age, when people spend a huge amount of time on social media, it is important to understand that the way that they communicate thru these online platforms can potentially affect their emotional health depending on the experiences they go thru. As a society, we emphasize on our social health based of our offline experiences such as accidents, education, etc. but it is now apparent that our online experiences are to be equally considered as well.
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