Ambreen Shabbir

Facebook and The Trouble with User’s Self-Esteem Since its launch in 2004 Facebook has become popular with extraordinary pace and volume, only last year it crossed 1 billion users. People use it to keep up with the ongoing events and happenings in the world. Also, it is a lot helpful in research and finding friends who can help out in the research. But apart from these pros, there are several cons of Facebook as well. Not only that it makes the user addict, but also it impacts its user’s self-esteem. According to the study conducted by The University of Gothenburg, Sweden there is an inverse relationship between the two variables i.e. Facebook usage and self-esteem. The more the Facebook usage is, lesser is the person’s self-esteem. Many people have reported that whenever they have used Facebook they had had a brief spell of anxiety and sometimes this spell was longer. No matter how much those people enjoyed surfing Facebook, at the end, they were hopeless and were subjected to depression and anxiety. Furthermore, as per the aforementioned study people especially women who used Facebook frequently seemed less content and happy with their lives. It is linked with the low self-esteem premise. The situation is described as the ‘Facebook envy’. On Facebook, there prevails a virtual image of ‘perfect life’. When going through the posts about people’s achievements and watching their happy moments all the time, one is not likely to be happy with their own life which is mediocre (as compared to the virtual or digital life of another person) and where nothing like the Facebook posts and pictures is happening. This feeling of dissatisfaction engenders envy and the person is not likely to get happy the next time he or she watches these pictures. The person may feel unhappy when there are all happy posts depicting a life of the Facebook friend and in his or her life there are struggles and pretty much to cope with. He/she may feel relish in watching sad posts as well. This miserable feeling that leaves a person depressed leads to low self-esteem as the person is no more sure about him/herself. There is also another factor in low self-esteem resulting out of Facebook usage. It is the amount of likes and comments one gets on his/her Facebook post especially the profile picture. When one does not get the amount of expected or hoped for likes or comments, he or she gets desperate and also disappointed. It also leads to low self-esteem as the person may think that the picture was worthy of likes. That would lead him/her to low self-esteem. The way out is just to shake oneself and realize that nobody’s life is perfect and everyone is struggling in their life. It is just the case that they do not like to share it. Everyone wants to show a good picture of himself and the life he is living. Furthermore, one really has to set his/her priorities and lessen the adherence to it with inducing balance in life. \ Conclusively, technology is never intrinsically bad. It is its use that makes it good or bad, so the Homo sapiens really need to consider and introspect if they are having bad impacts of technology. Same goes for Facebook and rest of the social media; one should consider adjusting their relationship to it if they are having bad impacts out of it.