Does Facebook make you happy? (eBook)

Scientific Study from the year 2011 in the subject Communications - Multimedia, Internet, New Technologies, grade: 7,8 (von 10), University of Amsterdam (Graduate School of Communication), course: Research Practice Seminare, language: English, abstract: One of the newer trends in the short history of the Internet are Social Networking Sites (SNS), which at the same time might be the future centre of online interaction. In the field of many social networks, it is Facebook that stands for a whole branch. And although users in the United States seem to visit Facebook less in beginning 2011 (AFP, 2011), the Palo Alto based company still reportedly has 600 million monthly active users (Carlson, 2011) and is therefore by far the worlds’ leading SNS.

Besides of communicating in the sense of sending text messages, SNS (and especially Facebook) allow their users to interact with other people, companies and public persons like politicians or artists. There are multiple new means of interaction, which range from men-tioned text messages to video and picture posting in various channels, separated by the amount of publicity that wants to be reached. Most of these means of interaction are related to one person or group which is addressed by the messages. Being a member of SNS often includes the presentation of your own person using a profile. Therefore, communi-cating and interacting on SNS includes a personal sphere, which may be related direct to the users’ profile or indirect to the users’ statements published.

Consequently to these assumptions, using SNS is able to directly affect the users’ mood and emotions. This research projects aims to investigate, by which kind and to what extent the usage of SNS influences its users daily live and their well-being in general. SNS are mostly seen as a positive extent of our modern lifestyle, but there might be negative ef-fects on users as well.

The following examples for behaviour influenced by SNS may illustrate the research pur-pose. More introvert people might see SNS as a chance to unclench themselves, while ex-trovert people are dissatisfied with the amount of reactions they receive. And it is quite sure that SNS do influence our lives, but does this only apply to heavy users? Which kind of feedback on the users’ activities on SNS does affect their well-being?