Social Media's Role In Peer Pressure 39
Daniel_Stuckey writes "The Fear of Missing Out phenomenon is part of why people tend to get addicted to social networking and then depressed. And if you're a young, impressionable teenager, it could pressure you into making sure you, too, are happily intoxicated the next time someone snaps a group shot. That's the gist of the latest study to find that social media photos of people drinking and smoking can influence teens into partaking in the same degenerate behavior. The University of Southern California study was published online today in the Journal of Adolescent Health."
Re:Afraid I missed this (Score:3, Insightful)
Whether or not you're missing out really depends on what your friends are posting. My friends constantly nag me about getting a Facebook account, and now and again there are conversations I'm slightly left out of where they'll say "See, if you had Facebook you'd know this".
Thing is, those conversations tend to be about incredibly inane things like cat videos and pictures of people at a party. Very rarely are they about something which is actually interesting or which actually matters, and in those situations you usually hear about it by word of mouth anyway. Facebook doesn't have a monopoly on information transmission, if you can live with not knowing until you see people the next morning it's not a big loss.
Re:Afraid I missed this (Score:5, Insightful)