• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, October 12, 2021

The following was previously published in an earlier edition of Media Insider.

This probably won’t come as a shock to anyone reading this: A recent study says that it’s not if you use social media that determines your happiness, but how you use social media. 

Derrick Wirtz, an associate professor of teaching in psychology at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan, took a close look at how people use three major social platforms—Facebook, Twitter and Instagram—and if how you use it can make you happier or sadder.

As I said, most of you probably said to yourself, “Yeah, that checks out.” But this study does bring up an interesting nuance with some far-reaching implications. 

In today’s world, we’re increasingly using Facebook to maintain our social connections. And, according to Facebook’s mission statement, that’s exactly what’s supposed to happen: “People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what's going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.”

The interesting thing in this study is the divide between our social activities -- those aimed at bonding versus those aimed at gaining status -- and how that impacts our moods and behaviors. It’s difficult to untangle the effect of those two factors, because they are so intertwined in our psyches. But according to this study, Dr. Wirtz found that some of us are spending far more time on social media “status-checking” then actually tending to our friendships.

“Passive use, scrolling through others’ posts and updates, involves little person-to-person reciprocal interaction while providing ample opportunity for upward comparison,” says Wirtz. 

We can scroll our newsfeed without any actual form of engagement -- but that’s not what we were designed to do. Our social skills evolved to develop essential mutually beneficial bonds in a small group setting.

Friendship is meant to be nurtured and tended to organically and intimately in a face-to-face environment.  But the distal nature of social media is changing the dynamics of how we maintain relationships in our network. 

Take how we first establish friendships, for instance. When you meet someone for the very first time, how do you decide whether you’re going to become friendly or not? The answer, not surprisingly, is complex and nuanced. Our brain works overtime to determine whether we should bond or not. But, also not surprisingly, almost none of that work is based on rational thought.

UCLA psychologist Dr. Elizabeth Laugeson teaches young adults with social challenges, such as those on the autism spectrum, how to take those very first steps toward friendship when meeting a stranger. If you can’t pick up the face-to-face nuances of body language and unspoken social cues intuitively, becoming friends can be incredibly difficult. Essentially, we are constantly scanning the other person for small signs of common interest from which we can start working toward building trust. 

Even if you clear this first hurdle, it’s not easy to build an actual friendship. It requires a massive investment of our time and energy. A recent study from the University of Kansas found it takes about 50 hours of socializing just to go from acquaintance to casual friend. 

Want to make a “real” friend? Tack another 40 hours onto that. And if you goal is to become a “close” friend, you’d better be prepared to invest at least a total of 200 hours. 

So that begs the question, why would we make this investment in the first place? Why do we need friends? And why do we need at least a handful of really close friends? The answer lies in the concept of reciprocity. 

From an evolutionary perspective, having friends made it easier to survive and reproduce. We didn’t have to go it alone. We could help each other past the rough spots, even if we weren’t related to each other. Having friends stacked the odds in our favor. 

This is when our investment in all those hours of building friendships paid off. Again, this takes us back to the intimate and organic roots of friendship. 

Our brains, in turn, reinforced this behavior by making sure that having friends made us happy. 

Of course, like most human behaviors, it’s not nearly that simple or benign. Our brains also entwine the benefits of friendship with the specter of social status, making everything much more complicated. 

Status also confers an evolutionary advantage. For many generations, we have trod this fine line between being a true friend and being obsessed with our own status in the groups where we hang out.

And then came social media.

As Wirtz’s study shows, we now have this dangerous uncoupling between these two sides of our nature. With social media, friendship is now many steps removed from its physical, intimate and organic roots. It is stripped of the context in which it evolved. And, it appears, the intertwined strands of friendship and social status are unraveling. When this happens, time on social media can reap the anxiety and jealousy of status-checking without any of the joy that comes from connecting with and helping a friend. 

On a person-to-person basis, this uncoupling can be disturbing and unfortunate. But consider what may happen when these same tendencies are amplified and magnified through a massive, culture-wide network.