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Thread: Status anxiety via status updates

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[quote=MARRIE,459337]The billions of updates can provide amusing, or often irritating, glimpses into the activities of friends, enemies, colleagues and exes. Baby videos, vacation photos and political statements you don't agree with can feel force-fed. So just defriend, right?

We do it in real life. Psychologists consider it an inevitable life stage where people achieve enough maturity and self-awareness to know who they are and what they want, and which friends deserve attention and which don't, The Times reported. The pruning process even has a clinical name: socioemotional selectivity theory.

But online, many find it hard to resist going through, well, other people's stuff. "I had this bizarre, voyeuristic habit of scrolling through people's travel photos online and then feeling like, 'Why haven't I walked the Great Wall of China?' And guilt: 'I should be taking my son to Spain.' I don't even like to travel!" Laura Zigman, a novelist, told The Times.

But users aren't just aggravating one another; the negative feelings extend to the creators of the software. Feeling jilted after Facebook filed for one of the most lucrative initial public offerings in history, some were asking, Where's my cut? "Without me, and the other 844,999,999 people poking, liking and sharing on the site, Facebook would look ... bleak, desolate and really quite sad," Nick Bilton wrote in The Times
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