Another day, another story on the supposed dangers of social networking, especially for young people. This one is on "Facebook depression." The American Academy of Pediatrics is now urging parents to be mindful of cyberbullying and says the endless stream of grinning pictures and "OMG my life is so awesome!" status updates could harm young people suffering from low self-esteem.  But my usual skeptical stance with regard to any story that implies social networking changes human nature was not budged a bit by this one.  On the contrary, I think that social networking may in fact be providing new information that could help kids who suffer because they are shunned and bullied in school.

For instance, the CBS news story says that reading Facebook updates and looking at pictures "can be more painful than sitting alone in a crowded school cafeteria or other real-life encounters that can make kids feel down".  As someone who was a well-bullied child and teenager, I strongly doubt it.  There's no opt-out when you're sitting alone in the cafeteria or a school bully has you cornered against the lockers and is molesting your or dressing you down, but online, even the geekiest geeks can click over to a forum where fellow travelers are speaking about the things they like.  Quoting teenagers who have no memory of life before the Internet isn't particularly useful, either, as CBS does: " 'Also, it's common among some teens to post snotty or judgmental messages on the Facebook walls of people they don't like,' said Gaby Navarro, 18, a senior from Grayslake, Illinois."  I don't know about what's going on with kids these days, but it's not like people didn't say that stuff to you in the pre-Internet era.  They just said it to your face, often gathering a handful of yes men to back them up, and again, there was no escape.

Cyberbullying is no different than regular bullying, with one giant exception: now there's a record.  Now parents, teachers, kids who play like they're oblivious, and other adults can see how vile the things that kids say to each other can be. Now we have a record of how ostracized some kids are, and how the popular kids use cruelty to reinforce their social status.  Now the problem is harder to paper over and ignore, because it's staring us in the face.  Feminists figured this one out a long time ago. The greatest weapon that rapists and domestic abusers have over their victims is the conspiracy of silence, and the greatest weapon to stop the violence has been to expose it to the light of day.  I think the same is true of school bullying. Now that we see bullying for what it is, it's much harder to pretend it's not a problem.

Honestly, I think social networking is one reason that there's been so much attention paid to bullying lately, and why we're getting responses like the White House Conference on Bullying Prevention.  The silence is being broken every day in little ways, as parents are seeing what kind of things are written on Facebook pages, and stories are written about bullying that employ the public record that was created of the bullying on social networks.  Without these resources, I think it would have been much harder to drive home how nasty bullying can really be.

Tags: Bullying, Facebook, teenagers

If it hadn't been true before, it's certainly true now: Facebook has become the stomping grounds of the usual hucksters of the Internet who are reaching into men's pants in order to pull out some coins. New software that purports to use image editing to "undress" pictures of your friends on Facebook is being marketed, and even though there's exactly zero chance that it produces anything close to a realistic image, I'm going to guess it sells well. Because when it comes to getting off, hope so often trumps reason. And there are definitely dudes out there getting off on Facebook.

Last April, I wrote a piece for the Daily Beast about the widespread secret of Facebook, which is that a chunk of its traffic, probably an uncomfortably large chunk, involves men looking at pictures of women for masturbatory purposes. After all, the single most common activity on Facebook is men looking at pictures of women, and while I'm sure some of that is perfectly innocent, much of it is not. It's not the most comfortable thought in the world. Facebook is about linking up with friends and isn't especially pornographic, after all, so the allure of using it for sexual purposes is that you know the women in the pictures. Social networking is voyeuristic by nature, and so turning that into a turn-on was inevitable. But, as I noted last year, this probably falls into the "no harm, no foul" zone of social networking. It's just the same as thinking about that person in your head, but with visual aids.

Of course, using crappy software to make someone look fake-naked isn't a greater violation, so long as the veil of secrecy continues to be pulled around this activity. But I'd still advise against it, for two reasons. One is simply aesthetic. It may be fun while you're doing it, but after all is said and done, the crappiness of it will haunt you in the same way crying at Titanic or enjoying the Black Eyed Peas will haunt you for the rest of your life. But more importantly, if you create images of people that are fake-naked, those could get out in the world in the same way that actual nude pictures inevitably do.  And then you would have crossed the line from having a private moment to actually harming an innocent person. So my advice to anyone tempted to buy this is to save your money and keep these images to your imagination.

Tags: Facebook, fake nudity, social networking

Apparently, we’re all crying over Facebook. My recent DoubleX piece about how Facebook makes us feel alone in our troubles by allowing us to broadcast only the cheeriest versions of our lives hit quite a nerve. (22,000 "Likes" so far, though, as I noted in the article, Facebook doesn’t offer a “Hate” button.) I’ve heard from a lot of people via e-mail, Twitter, story comments, and yes, Facebook, with many saying they’ve fallen prey to the social networking site’s mirage, and some women adding they agree with the piece’s contention that our gender may be especially vulnerable to it. Some have even said they quit Facebook because of this. The story has prompted a lot of discussions, including at an aptly named site called The Web of Loneliness (“A place for those who feel lonely, isolated, and alone to share with others”).  And others have written that I’m a wrongheaded idiot, that I’m jumping to conclusions, and/or that it is ourselves—not Facebook—that is to blame. Also fair.

On Twitter, folks have started using the Slate-created hashtag #sadbook to tweet about how Facebook makes them sad. A few actually made me laugh out loud, all but drying the tears from my latest Facebook session. (Just kidding. Mostly.) It should be said that many of the #sadbooks have nothing to do with social networking comparisonitis; they’re commentaries on bad spelling, on the boneheaded ways people treat each other online, and on the pathos you can often glimpse in the cracks of our networked lives. The best of the best:

When your 70-year-old dad shows up as "someone you might know."

Not sending friend requests to people from high school who were popular just in case they still think they're too good for me.

Photo albums consisting of nothing but selfshots taken in the bathroom. 

When the whole of the "friendship" is a repeated "Let's meet for coffee sometime." 

Noticing that one person in a group photo isn't tagged makes me sad. Who are they? Why won't anyone tag them?

An entire generation is going to grow up totally unaware that an ellipsis is only 3 periods ... not 16.

People who announce their divorce by changing their relationship status to "single."

The song that my close friend has referenced in his status update is by Nickelback.

Following the #sadbook feed.

Tags: #sadbook, alex jordan, Facebook, facebook making us sad, sadbook, Stanford, twitter

The latest survey of American college students says freshmen have never been more stressed or less satisfied. Almost one-third of them were nervous wrecks before they even got to college, and 48 percent of them say their emotional health is "below average." So what's everybody worried about? One thing's for sure: it ain't academics. Average study time has declined by 10 hours a week over the last 50 years (to 14 hours a week). And kids are more confident in their academic abilities than ever (66 percent expect at least a B average, and 71 percent say their academic abilities are above average).

In the reporting on the survey, the economy, probably justly, has come in for a lot of blame. Students' parents are unemployed at higher rates than they've ever been (although unemployment among the parents of college students is still much lower than it is in the general population). Young people know employers aren't going to be lined up after convocation with pre-printed business cards, and as early as freshman year, they're worried about getting jobs after they graduate.

But I think Libby Copeland's piece in Slate on the social ills of social media points to another possible culprit: Facebook. As Libby pointed out, someone who's already a little bit stressed, lonely, or sad is likely to come away from a 2-hour 2 a.m. Facebook trawl convinced that she's the only person in the world who is stressed, lonely, or sad. Everyone else is kissing their boyfriend or smiling in a bar with their dozen best friends or whipping up the "best. chocolate. chip. cookies. EVER."

I know that for myself, the "presentation anxiety" Libby describes was never more intense than during my freshman year of college. I went to a school where I knew precisely one person before classes started, and I was sure my Facebook profile would affect the way everyone else on campus saw me, forever. I tended my "favorites" list with more care than a FarmVille vegetable garden, wrote cheeky status updates (but not too often!) and never, ever, let on that I sometimes felt alone in a crowd of 25,000. But somehow, the knowledge that my own profile in no way reflected the reality of my life didn't stop me from taking everyone else's Facebook self at face value.

Significantly, the survey in question didn't ask people to describe themselves with phrases like "happy," "sad," or "about to set myself on fire with a Bunsen burner." They asked students to compare their emotional health to other students', with phrases like "above average," "average," and "below average." That kind of question requires respondents to figure out both what "average" is and where they are in relation to it. Despite Facebook's disconnect from reality, the site has a huge influence on people's perception of "average."  And because Facebook allows people to display all the glitter in their lives, but none of the shit, it's creating a perceived happiness inflation that might be every bit as pernicious as grade inflation.

Photograph by Nicholas Kamm for Getty Images.

Tags: college, Facebook, stress

Radical transparency, hacking, and revolution. These were the taglines for the top two contenders for Time Magazine’s relatively meaningless Person of the Year: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Wikileaking Nordic “sex symbol” Julian Assange.  While Time eventually settled on Zuck in a snub of Kanye proportions (Assange got the popular vote), it’s almost irrelevant. True, Zuckerberg is currently enjoying the spoils of Silicon Valley superstardom as Julian Assange lives the life of a fugitive, narrowly skirting indefinite detention for rape and sexual assault. But, as the Time profile notes, the two aren’t so different after all.

Zuckerberg and Assange are two sides of the same coin .... While Assange attacks big institutions and governments through involuntary transparency with the goal of disempowering them, Zuckerberg enables individuals to voluntarily share information with the idea of empowering them. Assange sees the world as filled with real and imagined enemies; Zuckerberg sees the world as filled with potential friends. Both have a certain disdain for privacy.

So, basically, Assange is Zuckerberg’s evil twin, and Time might as well have made its 2010 Person of the Year the Male Nerd God.

This is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. The problem is that we’re privileging one set of skills and values at the expense of another of equal worth and import. As young women are beginning to surpass men in education and income, notions of success have shifted away from traditional markers of achievement toward technological prowess and Big Ideas. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel plans to pay enterprising young college students to drop out of school and pursue tech glory and fame. And just look at the popularity of the TED talks, perhaps the greatest exponent of our national idea fetish. There were so few women among the selected speakers that they had to create a separate program just for lady innovators.

As society begins to embrace the profound importance of emotional intelligence and other “female” aptitudes, our cultural icons have become people like Zuckerberg, whom the media depicts as a brooding, maladjusted outsider. In fact, if you’re male and have been the subject of a lengthy magazine profile in the last two years, you’ve probably been described as having some form of low-grade Asperger’s—even when it’s blatantly untrue. At this rate, Time’s next winner will be an inanimate carbon rod.

Tags: Facebook, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, nerds, technology, Time person of the year, wikileaks

According to The Telegraph, this morning at 8 a.m. the British Monarchy entered the “final frontier” of digital technology and created a Facebook profile page. Unfortunately you're not allowed to actually friend any members of the royal family. Nor can you poke them or write, “Duuude, drinks tonight at Lion’s Head? ” on their wall, but you can comment “sexxxxy” on all the dashing press photos of Prince Harry doing various gentile society activities. (Though it seems he might have untagged the Nazi costume ones?) Most importantly, you can demonstrate your devotion to the monarchy by becoming a fan of the page. So far, almost 90,000 people have

Photograph of Queen Elizabeth II from Wikimedia Commons.

Tags: british monarchy, Facebook, The Queen

Over on the New Yorker blog Susan Orlean disseminates what The Social Network chose to overlook in favor of an IP drama: what Facebook and social networks actually mean for offline humans. Orleans writes: “Human relationships used to be easy: You had friends, boy- or girlfriends, parents, children, and landlords. Now, thanks to social media, it’s all gone sideways.” In her loose “Social Media Bestiary,” Orleans identifies four different types of friendship for this brave new world, including, well, friends, those people you actually share air with on a regular occasion, and “friend-like entities,” the virtual representations of people you’ve met online whether through MySpace or Goodreads, “or because some algorithm on Facebook “suggested” that you should be friends.” And according to some of the commenters on the post, friend-like entities seem even more precious—and prevalent—than friends. Good? Weird? Scary? All of the above?

Photograph of Susan Orlean by Joe Kohan for Getty Images.

Tags: Facebook, friendship, new yorker, Susan Orlean

You may have already heard the news that Facebook is frequently a “tool” for cheating spouses. Well, unsurprisingly, it’s a tool for catching cheating spouses, too. Lynn France, a 41-year-old occupational therapist from Ohio, discovered that her husband was having an affair after becoming suspicious of his frequent business trips. She followed him to a hotel, where she caught him cavorting with a “pretty blonde.” France later confronted her husband, and he promised to end his affair. Life went on. Until one day she searched for the woman’s name on Facebook and discovered that her husband’s supposedly former mistress had a slew of wedding pictures up—and France’s husband was the groom. Oh boy.

A recent survey by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers reported that 81 percent of divorce attorneys have seen an increase in social network exchanges used as incriminating evidence in divorce cases. Though I don’t quite buy into the common implication that Facebook makes a cheater out of you (one Web site that collects Facebook infidelity tales describes its audience as people who've "been cheated on because of Facebook.") Look at Don Draper—he has enough illicit rendezvous to make Tiger Woods jealous, and they’re all organized with a charming smile and a landline.

In the case of Lynn France, sure, Facebook revealed that her husband had a second wife and that her marriage was a sham. But on the bright side, it also revealed that her husband is an idiot who quite literally dressed as Prince Charming for his second wedding and was dumb enough to post the pics on Facebook. That has to provide some comfort.

Photograph by Karen Bleier/AFP.

Tags: cheating, Facebook, second marriage at Disney World

Michigan mom Aimee Louise Sword has been sentenced to at least nine years in prison for having sex with the 14-year-old biological son she gave up for adoption when he was a baby. In the Detroit Free Press article about Sword's sentencing, prosecutor Jessica Cooper says, "It’s the first time I’ve really seen something like that between a mother-son. But I have seen it unfortunately many times between a father-daughter." Though the notion of a parent having sex with his or her child is repellant to most, it is not unheard of in cases like Sword's, where the child was not raised by the parent in question.

It's called Genetic Sexual Attraction, and a Guardian article from 2003 says that the phenomenon is "increasingly acknowledged by post-adoption agencies to be a common feature of reunions between blood relatives who have never before met." The Guardian is using somewhat vague language because it's not something that has been studied very much: A CBC article from last year says there is only one piece of academic research on GSA. A British doctor and former adviser to London's post adoption center named Maurice Greenberg looked at 40 reunions of blood relatives who were meeting as strangers. According to the CBC:

[Greenberg] says interviewees described emotionally charged meetings and the shock of familiarity as they noticed the same interests, traits and mannerisms in their relative. Many described it as feeling like they were looking into a mirror. Combined with the feelings of loss and trauma associated with being put up for adoption and the excitement and fantasies of a reunion, the adoptees often felt vulnerable to such attraction.

GSA was in the news last year because of Mackenzie Phillips revelation that she had had "consensual" sex with her father, Mamas and Papas singer John Phillips. Sword connected with her son via Facebook, and it's possible that reunions among long-lost blood relatives will become more common with the rise of social networking. Since the vulnerability Greenberg described sounded accurate, this is probably not the last we'll hear of unfortunate cases like Sword's.

Tags: adoption, aimee sword, Facebook, genetic sexual attraction, incest, maurice greenberg

Facebook has racked up 15 million users in the Muslim world, just 14 months after its Arabic-language service was launched. How did it become wildly popular so quickly? Max Fisher of the Atlantic Wire offers a civic-minded explanation. According to Fisher, Facebook has caught on particularly well in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates because the site is a treasure trove of news and information in a region where anemic newspapers feed their readers a steady diet of political propaganda and salacious crime stories. But he completely missed what is perhaps the most alluring and obvious charm of Facebook to Arab youth: sex.

I live in the Gulf state of Qatar, where, in order to maintain propriety, a date between locals can consist of two young people sitting on opposite sides of a coffee shop talking to each other discreetly on cell phones. The ability of technology to facilitate romance is one of its most striking uses in this part of the world. Qatari youth, like others in the Gulf, lead romantic lives not unlike those of protagonists in Jane Austen’s novels, and it’s no coincidence that you’ll find quite a few fans of her work here (while enthusiasm for the racier SATC2 is … tepid, to say the least). Since unchaperoned male-female interaction is frowned upon, arranged marriages are commonplace, and so is unconsummated true love. Not to mention gay rendezvous: Facebook flirting is no substitute for the sexual act, and homosexual interactions will surely remain a part of life in the Gulf, though online tête-à-tête promises to fill the emotional chasm that divides men and women lusting after one another. Facebook is the next frontier in halal dating; it allows Arab youths to flirt and form attachments without doing anything haram, like the horizontal dabke.

But it’s just the newest addition to the technological arsenal put to use by Gulf youth to circumvent the strict constraints imposed on opposite sex interaction by traditional society. “Bluetooth cruising,” wherein cars filled with young men pull up beside women’s cars and use their devices to exchange phone numbers, is especially common in Kuwait. Messaging and “poking” on Facebook are potentially more satisfying modes of interaction than furtive texts sent back and forth at a darkened stoplight. Austen’s heroines treasured love letters; Gulf women have Facebook messages that let advances escape censorious eyes. There’s something to be said for a romantic life lived through letters (albeit LOLs and WYWHs).

Tags: arab world, Facebook, sex