Facebook Depression?

Posted on June 8, 2015 by Bob Rehak

In an online survey, the Center on Media and Child Health correlated the use of Facebook among college students, their feelings of envy and depression.

The study included 736 college students (68% female) enrolled in introductory journalism courses. Their mean age was 19 years,

The study found that heavy Facebook users were significantly more likely to experience symptoms of depression. Apparently, envy was the mediating factor. Users who did not feel envy when using Facebook were less likely to experience depression.

Ironically, a separate study by the Pew Foundation found that more than 80% of people on social networking sites exaggerate their profiles or outright lie.

My take: Perhaps if the budding journalists were aware of that, many would be less depressed. The congenitally honest seem to put themselves not only at a disadvantage, but at higher risk as well.

Signs of Cyberbullying in Children

Posted on December 15, 2014 by Bob Rehak

The Center on Media and Child Health publishes an electronic newsletter called Media Health Matters. The October 2014 edition contained tips to help parents understand when their children could be being cyberbullied. The phenomenon itself has received much attention in mainstream media. However the tips for spotting cyberbullying have not been.

Children are often reluctant to tell parents that they have been cyberbullied because they fear reprisals or criticism. Here are some tips offered by the Center that may help start a dialog. Look out for these warning signs, says the Center:

Becoming upset or sad after using the internet or mobile phone
Avoiding talking about computer or cell phone use.
Withdrawing from family, friends, and activities that they typically enjoy
A sudden or gradual drop in grades
Not wanting to go to school or specific activities, especially when peer groups are involved
Changes in behavior, attitude, sleep, appetite or showing signs of depression or anxiety.

For more information, read their entire article on Cyberbullying.

Social Networking in the Workplace

Posted on October 23, 2013 by Bob Rehak

Used with the permission of online-paralegal-programs.com

A lady named Aria Cahill called this infographic to my attention. “You posted what?!” I find the graphics to be a pretty compelling way to tell a story. Her client is online-paralegal-programs.com. This graphic educates people about the dangers of social networking at work, specifically posting information about one’s employer or manager that may be derogatory. As an employer myself, I can tell you that I work around the clock to provide opportunities to employees and provide the most positive work environment I can. Inevitably, though, people sometimes become disenchanted for one reason or another. When they take their gripes online instead of discussing them with me, it feels as though I’m being stabbed in the back. It “colors” my relationship with the employee. It especially hurts when they do it on company time, using company computers.

This poster discusses how many people use social networks at work; the percent of people who say they’re dissatisfied with their jobs; how people are unloading their gripes online; and how the gripes affect their relationships with employers.

The last section, “Not fired – Note even hired!” talks about how employers check online postings before hiring people now. Personally, when I see someone who has a history of criticizing others online, it causes me to wonder whether they will criticize our clients publicly and cost us business. If I’m forced to make a close call between two candidates for a position, that could make me decide against one and for another.

Infographics like this are very thought-provoking. They underscore some of the unintended consequences of Internet usage … namely, how people can shoot themselves in the foot. My thanks to the people at online-paralegal-programs.com for allowing me to reproduce it.

Collaborative History

Posted on August 26, 2013 by Bob Rehak

From 1973 to 1977, I photographed the people of a neighborhood in Chicago called Uptown. The project was a self-assignment but many of the photos I took there were later published by the Chicago Tribune. Then the images laid in a drawer for almost 40 years.

I recently rediscovered them and posted them on my photo blog, BobRehak.com, not to be confused with this blog at Robert Rehak.com. The response has been overwhelming. BobRehak.com has received 1.5 million hits in the last month. I say that, not to brag, but to introduce the subject of this post, collaborative history.

Many of the people in the images have written to tell me more about their circumstances and growing up in one of Chicago’s toughest neighborhoods. I’ve heard from policemen, firemen, teachers, social workers, residents, widows, gang members, writers, historians, shopkeepers and more.

Dozens of people have sent me valuable information that is helping to deepen my understanding of the neighborhood as well as the social and economic forces in play at the time. To put this into perspective, the year I started photographing there, the big news stories were “OPEC Oil Embargo” and “Watergate Tapes.” The embargo quadrupled gasoline prices in a year, threw the country into recession, and caused inflation to skyrocket. The tapes brought down the Nixon presidency within two years.

Lesser stories, including the struggle of working class families to make ends meet among these circumstances, got lost in the fog of time. Now, with the help of the Internet and readers, I am piecing their stories back together again. I hope to have a book ready by the end of the year.

When published, it will be more than a portfolio of my early documentary photographs. It will be a collaborative history of one of Chicago’s most fascinating neighborhoods, made possible through the spread of social media on the Internet. As readers see themselves in photos, they spread the word to their friends who are in other photos. Then they write me with the stories behind the photos.

While the stories I’m discovering do not all have happy endings, they do have important lessons. I learned last week of the fate of a gorgeous young woman. I wrote about her, “If she hadn’t been in Uptown, she could have been in Vogue.” She died young of HIV.

I also photographed a family with three kids. Two of them were in gangs. They always had cigarettes danging from their lips because it made them look tough. According to the widow of one, both moved to Alabama to escape the gang culture in Uptown, but then died from esophageal cancer in their mid-forties.

Yesterday, I was contacted by a Chicago firefighter after I posted a picture of his station house. He informed me that his engine company was the busiest in America during the decade of the 1970s and early 1980s. This helped put the slumlord protests that I photographed into perspective.

I’m finding many life lessons in the emails I get. I doubt the inventors of the Internet had collaborative history in mind when they designed the medium. But the social networks that the Internet spawned have created a tool to do just that.

Viral Communications and the Internet

Posted on July 19, 2013 by Bob Rehak

So, we’ve all heard about viral communications … as with those videos that someone posts on YouTube. Someone sees it, tells their friends, who tell THEIR friends, who tell THEIR friends and so on. It’s kind of like in the days before the Internet when “rumors would spread like wildfire.”

Robert Rehak’s Own Mini-Viral Communication Experience

Two days ago, a lady named Joanne Asala in Chicago who edits CompassRose.org said that she had come across some photographs that I had posted on BobRehak.com. I took them in Chicago’s Uptown Neighborhood back in the mid-1970s and the focus of her blog is the history of that neighborhood.

She asked permission to post two of the photos and refer people to my site to see the rest. I agreed. She posted them late Wednesday night. When I woke up on Thursday morning, traffic on BobRehak.com had spiked. My photo site had received 800 visits by 4 am. Within 24 hours, that number had swelled to more than 8000 and the trend has continued today – with each visitor viewing an average of 13 photos.

The point of talking about this mini-viral episode is not to brag, but to point out how valuable a single link can be. Ms. Asala’s post led to several others on Facebook and as news of my “historical time capsule” (as she called it) spread throughout Chicago, my site received thousands of new visitors and tens of thousands of page views.

Ground Zero for Poverty

At one time, in the 1920s, Uptown had been a summer resort and playground for Chicago’s rich and famous. By the 1970s, the neighborhood had spiraled downward. It was ground zero for poverty. Today, it seems Uptown is lurching toward gentrification again. The photos provide an interesting historical contrast.

Many of the visitors emailed me to say how the portfolio brought back memories of growing up in the area. Some felt misty-eyed. Others wanted to purchase prints. Others wanted to know whether I had pictures of their friends in my archives. Still others emailed me about the locations in the photos and told me what they looked like today. (I now live in Houston, not Chicago.)

Positive Side Effects of Viral Communication

Thanks to Ms. Asala, I was able to meet and network with many people online that I never would have been able to meet in real life. Often I talk about the side effects of communication technology on this blog. This is one side effect that was very positive.

From a marketers point of view, viral communications can be a dream – or nightmare – come true. Which it is depends on the content of the communication being spread. Several weeks ago, I wrote a post about viral communications “gone bad.” It was a review of Steven Wyer’s compelling book about Internet defamation and invasion of privacy. His book is called Violated Online. Happily, this experience was all positive.

Lessons learned

I took three things away from this experience:

Viral communications can improve site traffic exponentially. From an average of 100 visitors a day, traffic on BobRehak.com jumped to 10,000 in a little more than 24 hours. That’s a 100x increase from just one initial link!
Quality content is what keeps viral communication going. Without friends telling their friends, referrals die out.
Perhaps marketers should spend more time improving the quality of their communication and less time carpet bombing the public with insipid ads and commercials that people ignore.

Media Multitasking and Depression

Posted on July 17, 2013 by Bob Rehak

In my two previous posts, I explored the relationship between depression and Internet addiction, then depression and television viewing. Academic researchers have found positive correlations in both cases. This caused me to wonder whether a relationship existed between depression and multitasking.

Increase in Multitasking

Overall media use among America’s youth increased by 20% over the past decade. However, the amount of time spent multitasking with media (simultaneously interacting with more than one form of media) increased by 119% during the same time period [1].

Study Links Multitasking to Depression

Mark W. Becker, Reem Alzahabi, and Christopher J. Hopwood of Michigan State University published a study called Media Multitasking Is Associated with Symptoms of Depression and Social Anxiety in the February, 2013, issue of the journal Cyberspychology, Behavior and Social Networking. They studied 319 people and found that media multitasking was associated with higher rates of depression.

The authors couldn’t tell whether multitasking led to higher stress and depression or whether depressed people distracted themselves with multitasking to avoid coping with negative emotions. Given the relationships previously discussed between television viewing, Internet addiction and and depression, I have formulated an opinion on the relationship.

My Take

I personally subscribe to the theory, which Becker and his colleagues cite at the beginning of their study, that multitasking may be replacing face-to-face interactions [2], resulting in lower quality social interactions [3,4] and impaired psychosocial functioning [5,6].

Talking face-to-face and working side-by-side with friends and family is an infinitely richer and more rewarding experience than self-entertainment through media multitasking. It’s like the difference between healthy food and junk food.

Instead of working out their problems with others or honing their social skills, teens escape into a world of media multitasking. This world doesn’t argue with them, mock them, bully them or ostracize them. It’s a pleasant form of escapism that numbs the senses by overloading them. It’s fun. It’s entertaining. It’s much easier than dealing with the real world. And it doesn’t have the stigma or costs associated with drugs or alcohol.

Kids can even pretend to be doing their homework while working on their laptops. The noise coming from TV, music, and video games combines with the distraction of social networks, emails and texts to help them forget whatever is causing their depression. Being able to multitask is even considered a positive trait among many in business.

Multitasking isn’t all bad unless it turns into an addiction, such as a shopping addiction. Shopping addicts shop because their purchases give them a pleasant buzz. Then, when the bill comes due (which they can’t pay), it deepens their depression, leads to more shopping and a downward spiral. A similar mechanism may be at work with multitasking for the segment of the population prone to depression.

We’ve all fallen into the trap from time to time of mistaking activity for achievement. We succumb to the tyranny of the urgent and the easy over the important. Answering emails, texts, and checking social networks somehow seems more important than that big long-term project due at the end of the week.

The scary thing about 10.5 hours of multimedia exposure per day with kids and teenagers is that it happens at a time when their cognitive and thought processes are being formed. To the extent that it becomes a habit or an addiction, the pattern becomes hard to break.

Statistics On Depression

Depression takes a huge toll on America’s health and productivity. According to Mental Health America, It affects more than 21 million American children and adults annually and is the leading cause of disability in the United States for individuals ages 15 to 44. Lost productive time among U.S. workers due to depression is estimated to be in excess of $31 billion per year. It is also the principal cause of more than 38,000 suicides in the U.S. each year.

____________________________

Rideout V, Foehr U, Roberts D., Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds. Menlo Park, CA: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. 2010.
Nie NH. Sociability, interpersonal relations, and the Internet: Reconciling conflicting findings. American Behavioral Scientist Special Issue: The Internet in everyday life. 2001;45(3):420-35.
Lee PSN, Leung L, Lo V, Xiong C, Wu T. Internet communication versus face-to-

face interaction in quality of life. Social Indicators Research. 2011;100(3):375-89.
Moody EJ. Internet use and its relationship to loneliness. CyberPsychology & Behavior. 2001;4(3):393-401.
Kraut R, Patterson M, Lundmark V, Kiesler S, Mukophadhyay T, Scherlis W. Internet paradox: A social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological well-being? American Psychologist. 1998;53(9):1017-31.
Shapira NA, Lessig MC, Goldsmith TD, et al. Problematic internet use: Proposed classification and diagnostic criteria. Depression and Anxiety. 2003;17(4):207-16.

Internet addiction and depression

Posted on July 13, 2013 by Bob Rehak

Is there a link between internet addiction and depression? I have often observed that Internet addicts seem less sociable than others – more focused on electronic interaction than physical interaction. I wonder if electronic interaction is somehow less satisfying emotionally and if that could contribute to depression.

The need for personal connection is one of our deepest needs. But connecting online lacks many of the elements that make physical interaction so satisfying. You can’t see people smile, shake their hands, or hug them. And you can’t smell the cookies they baked for you. Electronic interaction lacks many of the positive aspects of physical interaction. It is better than nothing, but a poor surrogate for the real thing. The electronic interaction, while good in itself, underscores physical disconnectedness.

Recently, I came across articles on two trend studies that brought this issue into focus.

The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics reported a 400% increase in the use of anti-depressant drugs in the period between 1988-94 and 2005-08.
The Pew Foundation reported exponential growth in Internet social networking during the latter period. See chart below.

So I looked for research to see if these two things were, in fact, related.

In 2010, the journal Psychopathology published a study called, “The Relationship between Excessive Internet Use and Depression: A Questionnaire-Based Study of 1,319 Young People and Adults” by C. M. Morrison and H. Gore from the University of Leeds in the UK.

The authors studied the link between Internet addiction (AI) and depression among 1,319 respondents. They found a close relationship between AI tendencies and depression, such that IA respondents were more depressed. Among their conclusions:

Those who regard themselves as dependent on the Internet report high levels of depressive symptoms. Those who show symptoms of IA are likely to engage proportionately more than the normal population in sites that serve as a replacement for real-life socialising.

“The internet now plays a huge part in modern life, but its benefits are accompanied by a darker side,” said lead author of the report Dr. Catriona Morrison. “There is a small subset of the population who find it hard to control how much time they spend online, to the point where it interferes with their daily activities.”

“Our research indicates that excessive internet use is associated with depression, but what we don’t know is which comes first – are depressed people drawn to the internet or does the internet cause depression? What is clear, is that for a small subset of people, excessive use of the internet could be a warning signal for depressive tendencies.”

In 2007, Psychopathology published another study called “Depression and Internet Addiction in Adolescents” by J.H. Ha, S.Y. Kim, S.C. Bae, H. Kim, M. Sim, and I.K. Lyoo, and S.C. Cho.

This group studied 452 Korean adolescents. First, they evaluated subjects for their severity of Internet addiction. Second, they investigated correlations between Internet addiction and depression, alcohol dependence and obsessive-compulsive symptoms. They also found that Internet addiction was significantly associated with depressive symptoms and obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Their data suggests the need to evaluate underlying depression in the treatment of Internet-addicted adolescents.

This year, Psyopathology also published another study on the subject. It was a survey of previously published academic research called, “The Association between Pathological Internet Use and Comorbid Psychopathology: A Systematic Review.” The authors of this study were: V. Carli, T. Durkee, D. Wasserman, G. Hadlaczky, R. Despalins, E. Kramarz, C. Wasserman, M. Sarchiapone, C.W. Hoven, R Brunner and M. Kaess.

They evaluated all of the studies about pathological Internet use (PIU) on MEDLINE, PsycARTICLES, PsychINFO, Global Health, and Web of Science. They found relationships to depression, anxiety, symptoms of attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive-compulsive symptoms, and hostility/aggression.

The majority of research was conducted in Asia. Of the twenty articles they reviewed, 75% reported significant correlations of PIU with depression, 57% with anxiety, 100% with symptoms of ADHD, 60% with obsessive-compulsive symptoms, and 66% with hostility/aggression. The strongest correlations were observed between PIU and depression; the weakest was hostility/aggression.

My Take

Could it be that lonely, depressed people self-medicate by socializing on the Internet to make themselves feel less lonely? In the end, do they only makes themselves more depressed by isolating themselves from family, friends and support networks?

The advertising industry trade journal Ad Age reports that:

Time spent with computers has tripled over the past decade among kids age 8 to 18. The bulk of this group’s time is spent on social media, followed by games, video sites and instant messaging. The average kid packs a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content into a daily seven and a half hours of media exposure.

Facebook may be a great way to stay in touch with friends, but it’s not quite the same thing as a hug. An email to your brother or sister isn’t quite the same thing as having dinner with him or her. An online role playing game with someone in another state isn’t quite the same thing as a pickup game of basketball down at the local playground. Or playing catch with your dad. Or baking with your mom and watching the smiles as an apple pie comes out of the oven.

An electronic social life is at best a surrogate experience for personal connection. Just like the personal handwritten letters that people used to write, electronic interaction often results in bittersweet feelings: sweet because you’re connecting, bitter because you’re still apart.

This can lead to emotional burn out for Internet addicts. They find themselves going online more and more to get the same sense of connection they once felt. But the emotional mailbox is empty. The increased time they spend online simply underscores their separation from family and friends. Kind of depressing, huh? The answer may not be in pills. It may be in logging onto life.

Online Predators

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Bob Rehak

ABC13 News ran a story this week about a child predator putting up an ad on Craigslist to lure teenage girls. A Harris County Precinct 4 constable posing as a 14-year old girl nabbed the man when he requested the constable to send him “naughty pics” and solicited sex. The constable tracked the man to his phone via an IP address distributed from his company’s WIFI network. Authorities say this is a disturbing trend that’s growing exponentially – targeting young girls online. So I did a little research.

InternetSafety101.org says that “Often, we have an image of sexual predators lurking around school playgrounds or hiding behind bushes scoping out their potential victims, but the reality is that today’s sexual predators search for victims while hiding behind a computer screen, taking advantage of the anonymity the Internet offers.”

NetSmartz.org says, “Although the Internet did not create child predators, it has significantly increased the opportunities predators have to meet victims while minimizing detection.”

InternetSafety101.org published these 2010 statistics from the Journal of Adolescent Health:

Only 18% of youth use chat rooms, however, the majority of Internet-initiated sex crimes against children are initiated in chat rooms.
In 82% of online sex crimes against minors, the offender used the victim’s social networking site to gain information about the victim’s likes and dislikes.
65% of online sex offenders used the victim’s social networking site to gain home and school information about the victim.
26% of online sex offenders used the victim’s social networking site to gain information about the victim’s whereabouts at a specific time.

Microsoft advises that parents can help protect their kids by knowing the risks related to online communication and being involved in their kids’ Internet activities. The company points out that online predators:

Find kids through social networking, blogs, chat rooms, instant messaging, email, discussion boards, and other websites.
Seduce their targets through attention, affection, kindness, and even gifts.
Know the latest music and hobbies likely to interest kids.
Listen to and sympathize with kids’ problems.
Try to ease young people’s inhibitions by gradually introducing sexual content into their conversations or by showing them sexually explicit material.
Might also evaluate the kids they meet online for future face-to-face contact.

So how can your kids reduce the risk of being victimized? Precautions that kids can take, include:

Never downloading images from an unknown source.
Using email filters.
Telling an adult immediately if anything that happens online makes them feel uncomfortable or frightened.
Choosing a gender-neutral screen name that doesn’t contain sexually suggestive words or reveal personal information.
Never revealing personal information about themselves (including age and gender) or information about their family to anyone online and not filling out online personal profiles.
Stopping any email communication, instant messaging conversations, or chats if anyone starts to ask questions that are too personal or sexually suggestive.
Posting the family online agreement near the computer to remind them to protect their privacy on the Internet.

If your child is being targeted, the FBI advises:

Contact your local police. Save any documentation including email addresses, website addresses, and chat logs to share with the police.
Check your computer for pornographic files or any type of sexual communication—these are often warning signs.
Monitor your child’s access to all live electronic communications, such as chat rooms, instant messaging, and email.

For more information, see the FBI’s publication: A Parent’s Guide to Internet Safety.

The Internet and Virtual Pajama Parties

Posted on June 4, 2013 by Bob Rehak

I have a single friend in Seattle who is redefining “social media.” She is one of those cutting-edge Internet users who is always one of the first to discover new ways to use the medium. She told me last week about a novel practice (for me at least) that she and her cross-country coterie of girlfriends have: virtual pajama parties via the Internet.

Every week at an appointed time, they all log on to the Internet together to watch a video. Because they live in four different time zones, this requires some coordination.

They all pop their popcorn beforehand. Then they cuddle up with their laptops on the couch. They log into a video chatroom and establish connectivity. They pull up a streaming movie in a second window. Then on cue, they all hit “play” simultaneously. Throughout the movie, they comment on the action. “He’s hot.” “Can you believe she said that?” “What a dirt-bag!” “Do you think they’ll …?” When the movie is over, they continue chatting for a while before logging off and going to bed.

Some of the people in this group have never met in real life. They found each other online at a blog for writers and became friends by virtue of their mutual interests.

When I was a kid, people talked a lot about how television was replacing the fireplace as the center of American family life. Now the Internet is replacing the television and the “family” can be scattered around the globe.

Weather Apps Can Be Lifesavers When Tornadoes Approach

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Bob Rehak

This blog is dedicated to exploring the side effects of new communication technologies. Often those unintended side effects are negative. In the last 24 hours, as killer tornadoes swarmed across Oklahoma, several positive side effects of the new technologies became apparent.

Extra Warning Time

Perhaps the most striking examples are weather apps for smartphones. ABC News last night interviewed a survivor of the devastating tornado packing 200 mile per hour winds that devastated Moore, Oklahoma. The survivor talked about how a weather app on his iPhone warned him of the approaching storm 15 to 20 minutes before it struck his location, giving him time to get out of its path.

It appeared that he used my favorite weather app, one called RadarScope. This powerful app enables users to see storms coming at them in real time from more than 100 miles away. Many other apps can do that too. What makes this one so powerful is its stunning accuracy and range of measurement tools.

I’ve found that RadarScope’s accuracy can be measured in city blocks and minutes. In addition to reporting storms’ reflectivity, it also reports velocity, rainfall amounts, storm height, movement at different levels within storms, and much more. It’s a tool designed for professional meteorologists that amateurs can also appreciate.

As I write this 12 hours after the storm struck Moore, the death toll there has already reached 91 and is expected to climb even higher. One can only wonder how much worse the tragedy would have been were it not for weather apps that gave people time to evacuate or reach storm shelters.

Lost-and-Found Role for Social Media

Social media are also already playing a role in the recovery from this storm. As people find mementos, they are posting images of them online, turning the Internet into the world’s largest lost-and-found system.

Media Impacts

Unintended Consequences

Category Archives: Social Media