The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  The demographic data among the students who took the online survey break down as follows:

  Gender: Male 26.76%; female 73.19%; agender 0.23% (2); transgender 0.23% (2); other 0.59% (5)

  Race: White/Caucasian 67.56%; Hispanic 7.73%; black 8.55%; East Asian/Asian 7.26%; Native American 0.7% (6); South Asian/Indian 2.11% (18); Middle Eastern 0.82% (7); other 5.27% (45)

  Sexual orientation: Heterosexual 90.21%; gay 3.34%; lesbian 0.95% (8); bisexual 5.49%; transgender 0%

  School type: Public 11.48%; private-secular 35.6%; Catholic 24.71%; Christian, non-Catholic 28%

  School year: First-year 32.32%; sophomore 21.43%; junior 27.4%; senior 18.85%

  This book by no means exhausts the qualitative data I collected from all the student participants, whether from the interview or the online survey, and will not be the only product that will result from this national study.

  A LAST NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR’S PERSONAL LOCATION IN RELATION TO SOCIAL MEDIA

  I am not now, nor have I ever been, “a social media person.” I had a Facebook profile for many years and then deactivated it because I didn’t ever post and, like so many of the students I interviewed, often didn’t love what I saw of others when I looked at the newsfeed. There is something about the publicness of it all, in my own life and the way that it exposes the lives of others, that makes me feel stressed. Although I enjoy seeing pictures of my friends’ babies, I’d rather see their actual babies. I want to know all about my friends’ lives, but I’d rather my friends update me when we meet for coffee or dinner. I tried Twitter for a while and failed miserably at it. I just don’t have anything to tweet. I don’t take the time to think of what to say. I’m not a multitasker. I still read the newspaper, the kind that gets printed on actual paper. The same goes for books.

  I don’t have a smartphone either. I never have. I’ve joked that I am a conscientious objector, but I’m not entirely kidding when I say this to friends and colleagues. I still have a “dumb phone,” which can get calls and can text, but I have to push the number buttons multiple times to type out the letters I need, and it takes forever to get out a sentence. When I leave my house, I leave the Internet behind, and I prefer it that way. Like just about everyone I know and the students who participated in my study, I struggle with the compulsion to check email and sometimes find it almost impossible to concentrate and do my work when I could just spend time looking at real estate listings and food and cute cat videos. By choosing not to have a smartphone, I am choosing to free myself of that compulsion when I’m out in the world. It’s part of how I manage the ways that new technologies are changing my own life.

  So what am I doing conducting research about how social media affects the lives of college students, and how will my own position on it affect what I’ve written about in this book?

  First, even though I’m not currently active on social media, I am young enough to be on the edge of the first generation that it truly changed. Social media permeated my twenties and thirties, and it fascinates me endlessly. I know enough about it to understand both its attractions and its dangers; I can boast enough experience with it to have both enjoyed and struggled with it.

  But more important, I believe that my presence or absence online and with respect to owning a smartphone stands apart from who I am as a scholar and professor, a dedicated teacher, and a person whose research has revolved around issues of concern to young adults and college students for well over a decade. I do my best to listen to what college students want to talk about, to hear their concerns, consider their questions, and take their struggles seriously. Social media is so often on their minds, but they feel that the adults in their lives aren’t really paying attention to it in the way that they should. So, in my role as a teacher and researcher, I’ve done my best to attend to what these students are concerned about. I’m most interested in how young adults feel about what they post and do and see online and on their devices, because that is what they are most interested to know.

  I am sure that some people will see my own relationship to social media and smartphones as a potential weakness of this work, but I hope that most readers and colleagues will trust in my profound concern, deep respect, and love for the students I have met and worked with over the years and will understand how this grounds my research. And while many academics and writers use social media and smartphones as often and as adeptly as the students described in this book, as someone with a bit of distance, I hope I have offered a different sort of wisdom on the stories the students tell and the questions they raise. Social media and smartphones are so pervasive that I believe we need a diversity of voices and perspectives about what they mean—and how they are changing the meaning of our lives. I hope that the research presented here provides a new and thought-provoking window into this subject.

  notes

  Introduction

  1.All names are pseudonyms, including those referring to sororities and fraternities, as well as any friends or school-sponsored events mentioned by the students.

  2.Throughout this book, I have chosen—out of respect for the students who participated in the interview process, on behalf of consideration for my readers, and to improve the fluidity of the prose—to edit out unnecessary words such as “like,” “um,” and “oh” and other vocal hesitations that people use as they talk, as long as doing so does not change the meaning of what is said.

  3.There are a number of well done book-length studies that explore the millennial generation’s relationship to social media and new technologies more generally, however. First among them is danah boyd’s It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), which is an effort at translating for parents and others why teens love social media so much, and why it’s a useful, identity-building aspect of their lives, as opposed to the destructive, dangerous force that so many people fear it is. Then, in The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), Howard Gardner and Katie Davis also explore the ways in which social media is changing young adults’ sense of identity today, though they do so primarily in negative ways.

  Then, a number of more academic, book-length treatments look at social media and how it is shaping (and reshaping) our world overall, regardless of age and generation. In Social Media: Usage and Impact (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), Hana S. Noor Al-Deen and John Allen Hendricks provide a comprehensive and scholarly analysis of social media, with contributions that examine the implementation and effect of social media in various environments, including educational settings, strategic communication, advertising, public relations, politics, and legal and ethical issues. In the edited collection The Social Media Reader (New York: NYU Press, 2012), Michael Mandiberg presents pieces on peer production, copyright politics, and other aspects of contemporary (Web 2.0) Internet culture, including collaboration and sharing and the politics of social media and social networking. In The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), Jose van Dijck describes the rise of social media in the first decade of the twenty-first century up until 2012, providing both a historical and a critical analysis of the emergence of major platforms in the context of a rapidly changing ecosystem of connective media. Looking at five major platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia), van Dijck notices similar technocultural and socioeconomic ideological principles guiding their development as well as similarities between these platforms’ shifting ownership status, governance strategies, and business models. Finally, in The Social Media Handbook (New York: Routledge, 2013), Jeremy Hunsinger and Theresa M. Senft present a collection of essays that explore how social media are changing disciplinary understandings of the Internet and our everyday lives. Rather than considering social media in terms of specific technologies, chapters in the book engage topics across a range of research techniques, practices, and theories and address b
road topics, including community, gender, fandom, disability, and race.

  4.For more information about young adults and narcissism, see Jean Twenge, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before (New York: Free Press, 2006), and also Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (New York: Atria Press, 2009). For a comprehensive overview of the Millenial generation (in general), see The Millennials: Connecting to America’s Largest Generation (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2011), for which Thom S. Rainer and Jess W. Rainer conducted twelve hundred interviews with Millennials in order to better understand them personally, professionally, and spiritually.

  5.One of the most divisive topics related to sexting is how it should be handled by authorities and what punishments should be handed out, especially as it relates to sexting by minors. Some legal scholars refer to the images as “self-produced child pornography,” and some believe that minors who send sexts should be prosecuted under existing child pornography statutes. Most states, however, have so far taken a somewhat more lenient approach, often allowing juvenile offenders to be charged with a misdemeanor or a lesser offense so they can qualify for diversion programs and have their records expunged. Still others believe sexting by teenagers should be handled by teachers or parents instead of the courts. Perhaps most alarming is the fact that while sexting is considered widespread among teens, most teens are unaware of the consequences of the behavior, such as that sending a sext could potentially be prosecuted as a felony under child pornography laws in some states. For a selection of news stories on teens and sexting see Nathan Koppel and Ashby Jones, “Are ‘Sext’ Messages a Teenage Felony or Folly?,” Wall Street Journal, Eastern Edition, August 25, 2010, D1–D2; Jan Hoffman, “States Struggle with Minors’ Sexting,” New York Times, March 27, 2011, Riva Richmond, “Sexting May Place Teens at Legal Risk,” New York Times, March 26, 2009, gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/sexting-may-place-teens-at-legal-risk/?_r=0; Maia Szalavitz, “Nearly 1 in 3 Teens Sext, Study Says. Is This Cause for Worry?,” Time, July 2, 2012, http://healthland.time.com/2012/07/02/nearly-1-in-3-teens-sext-study-says-is-this-cause-for-worry/; and Conor Friedersdorf, “The Moral Panic over Sexting,” Atlantic, September 2, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/for-sexting-teens-the-authorities-are-the-biggest-threat/403318/.

  6.For readers interested in a detailed treatment of the methodology for both the interview and the online survey process, participant selection, demographics of participation, and so forth, see the methodological appendix at the back of this book.

  7.In a nationwide study conducted by the Pew Research Center, survey data gathered in September 2009 showed that 73 percent of online American teens used social networking websites, followed closely by young adults aged eighteen to twenty-nine at 72 percent. Looking at the difference between older and younger teens, 82 percent of those aged fourteen to seventeen used social networking sites, compared with only 55 percent of those aged twelve to thirteen. Cell phone ownership is nearly ubiquitous among teens and young adults, as is Internet use. See Amanda Lenhart, Kristen Purcell, Aaron Smith, and Kathryn Zickuhr, “Social Media and Mobile Internet Use among Teens and Young Adults,” Pew Internet & American Life Project (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2010).

  8.See Casey Fiesler, “How Missouri Could Demonstrate What’s Wonderful about Yik Yak,” Slate.com, November 12, 2015, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/11/the_university_of_missouri_protests_and_yik_yak.html, for one example of how students at the University of Missouri are using Yik Yak to fight back against such racist commentary from their peers on this same platform.

  9.A total of 736 students chose to answer this optional question. Throughout this book, I will provide the raw number of student answers to a particular question in the endnotes each time I refer to survey data so that readers interested in such numbers will have them readily available.

  10.According to the 2012 Pew Research survey on social media, 81 percent of teens between twelve and seventeen use social media and 77 percent of them are on Facebook. See Maeve Duggan and Joanna Brenner, “The Demographics of Social Media Users—2012,” Pew Internet & American Life Project (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2013). The Pew Center also reported that at least 24 percent of teens in this age group go online “nearly constantly.” For more information, see Amanda Lenhart, Maeve Duggan, Andrew Perrin, Renee Stepler, Harrison Rainie, and Kim Parker, “Teens, Social Media and Technology Overview” (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2015). Then there is the growing relationship between social media and the college experience itself. In their article “Are Students Really Connected? Predicting College Adjustment from Social Network Usage,” Educational Psychology 35, no. 7 (2015): 819–834, John Raacke and Jennifer Bonds-Raacke examine the relationships between social network usage and adjustment to college in the academic, social, personal-emotional, and university affiliation domains. The authors’ results showed that social network usage was related to college adjustment; specifically, those students who reported higher rates of social media usage reported lower levels of adjustment to college in all domains.

  Chapter 1

  1.José Van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 13. For more on this subject, see also Taina Bucher, “Want to Be on the Top? Algorithmic Power and the Threat of Invisibility on Facebook,” new media & society 14, no. 7 (2012): 1164–1180.

  2.It has been well documented that being on social media can make people feel isolated, and that public sharing of self does not necessarily make a person feel more known or understood. Important to the entire conversation of this book is the work of MIT professor and scholar, Sherry Turkle. In Alone Together, for example, Turkle introduces the notion of “I share therefore I am” as a new state of the self, and roots the implications of this and the underlying psychology of it in object relations theory. Turkle is grappling with the idea of a self that is constructed through showing itself to others—the construction of self via public sharing—a concept and theory of self that grows ever more important the more sharing everyone does online and in social media. Please see Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011).

  3.As with Margaret, Van Dijck’s “popularity principle” and its relationship to “likes” applies so clearly here with a student like Rob, too: he is fairly obsessed with accumulating that silent yet visible applause from people pressing that “like” button on his behalf, and he experiences a clear sense of disapproval when people don’t press it. He also spends an enormous amount of time during each day trying to figure out how to get more and more of the kind of boost “likes” give him, too.

  4.Like the students for this study, the media also thinks a lot about how “likes” are affecting all of us. In her article “How Millennials Use Facebook Now,” Huffington Post, HuffPost Tech United Kingdom, March 19, Eleanor Moss notes that Millennials know their friends and others online will likely look them up on Facebook, and that by carefully curating a list of “liked” pages, young adults actively create a persona or identity that will make them seem cool, intelligent, funny, or caring, among other favorable characteristics. Additionally, Moss points out that young adults will often be highly influenced as to whether to follow a page themselves based on how many of their friends have “liked” it; For a more scholarly take, see also “Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable from Digital Records of Human Behavior,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 15 (2013): 5802–5805, where Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel found that Facebook “likes” can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes, including sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental sepa
ration, age, and gender. The authors give examples of associations between these various attributes and “likes” and discuss implications for online personalization and privacy.

  5.People have long wondered if Facebook would ever add a “dislike” button to go alongside the “like” one, and many have wished for such a feature. Though Facebook continues to resist the “dislike” button, they added a series of five new emojis “reaction buttons” meant to convey: “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad,” and “angry.” For an analysis of these new buttons, see Will Oremus, “Facebook’s Five New Reaction Buttons: Data, Data, Data, Data, and Data,” Slate.com, February 24, 2016, http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2016/02/24/facebook_s_5_new_reactions_buttons_are_all_about_data_data_data.html.

  6.And I thank Kaling for the inspirational title. For a fuller dose of Mindy Kaling’s humor, see her memoir in full: Is Everybody Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2012).

  7.For more on FOMO, see Andrew Przybylski, Kou Murayama, Cody R. DeHaan, and Valerie Gladwell’s “Motivational, Emotional, and Behavioral Correlates of Fear of Missing Out,” Computers in Human Behavior 29, no. 4 (2013): 1841–1848. It turns out the media has gone pretty wild for articles about FOMO, too, and for a selection of them, see the following: Safronova’s article “On Instagram, the Summer You Wish You Were Having,” New York Times, August 20, 2015, D1–D7, in which she looks at FOMO as a side effect of social media sharing. Jenna Wortham’s “Feel Like a Wallflower? Maybe It’s Your Facebook Wall,” New York Times, April 10, 2011, BU3, also presents FOMO as one of the negative consequences of the immediacy of information received through social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Instagram. Wortham notes that the immediacy with which we can now receive updates about what others are doing serves to amplify the anxiety, inadequacy, and irritation one can feel when using social media. Hephzibah Anderson, in her article “Never Heard of Fomo? You’re So Missing Out,” Guardian, April 16, 2011, notes that the ability to instantaneously post about what one is doing causes others to feel like they are missing out and also prevents us from living in the moment and enjoying an experience that is ours alone. Finally, for a more positive take on the FOMO phenomenon, see Holly Williams, “Fear of Missing Out May Be a Latter-Day Anxiety, but We All Need to Embrace It,” Independent, May 23, 2015, which—while acknowledging its potential negative impacts on our lives—argues that FOMO can also have positive effects, in that it can encourage us to go out and engage in activities we might otherwise not be willing to do.