Can facebook be another form of peer pressure?

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Someone shared this (even if it has nothing to do with what i am gonna blog) and it got me wondering, can facebook, a social networking site, be a form of peer pressure? In facebook, ‘sharing’ is a strategy for you to share your life with your friends, thus making you and your friends closer. Okay maybe I’m still fresh out from the psychiatric dept, and that may got my mind wired to look out for any psychosocial stress factor in every angle.

You had nearly 500 friends, and every time you click 'SHARE', you are sharing with each one of them. Okay, so the privacy and security point of this has been discussed here and there. But what about the psychosocial point of view?

You share your daily life, including your campus/student life, and if you’re working, work life. So what if he’s doing some astounding course oversea while you’re doing what’s left in hometown. What if he’s a damn awesome pilot? Or a freaking astronaut? While you are still in-between jobs.You share with the whole circle of friends what you do in daily life, whether it’s stated in your info, or your hourly-update-status shows who you are. You were once happy with your daily life, but seeing that person picture,smiling happily near the rocket, or jobs that sent them here and there, or amazing places that they go while their semester break, you tend to look down on yourself, you shy away from them, thinking that they have ‘the life’. We don’t go and say, “hey, what are you up to nowadays?” nowadays. We click on those info pages or we scroll down their wall instead. They might just have a bitter life, but we never know that, and yet we are jealous of them. Kind of peer pressure, don’t you think?

Picture this. The day before you were happy, hanging out with friends on your off-duty day, daily, you are busy and you actually know that you are not ready for a relationship. But today, when you open your facebook account, you see SIX wedding invitations or pictures of couples here and there, and you begin to wonder when will you have that special someone. Sometimes you wish that you had that special someone and be happy like those in the pictures that they shared. OR you recently break off from your relationship and the whole circle knows. You tend to look for your friends’ support by posting status blaming him. Why do you actually do that? Are you afraid that friends talks behind your back and you can be the good guy? Peer pressure written all over that.

(Real) Social Life. Some of us went overboard by updating their super happening life to facebook. Every week or even worse,day(!), there will be pictures and status updates of where they went for their weekly cool hang out and who they have been with. Then there will be some who will think that their life is empty and wish somehow that they had that ‘cool’ kind of life too. Please don’t tell me this is happening. It’s a total show of peer pressure. Everyone has their own cool-in-some-kind-of-way life.

Even in those freaking stupid lame addictive time-filling games, people tend to race each other. Of course, that’s the point of playing games. But staying up all night  watering crops virtually, giving other 55 pets visits, even baking for every 30 minutes and even waking up in the middle of the night to harvest your plants is crazy. Just so you can be one level up from person A, and have that villa, clothes, decorations that you’ve been eyeing to have for your avatar in that game. Pressure by peers. Duh.

Using Facebook has their ups and downs. It’s up to us to use it wisely. Feel good about yourself, use facebook moderately. I hate to see you end up in some psychiatric ward.