{"id":40480,"date":"2012-10-30T13:00:47","date_gmt":"2012-10-30T17:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=40480"},"modified":"2013-03-28T14:12:22","modified_gmt":"2013-03-28T18:12:22","slug":"like-facebook-and-schadenfreude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/10\/30\/like-facebook-and-schadenfreude\/","title":{"rendered":"Like: Facebook and Schadenfreude"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I was the 501st<\/sup> person to join Facebook. The inimitable Hatty Hong, number 499, urged me on from her desk across our freshman dorm room. I hardly used it the first few months because so few others were active, and as a senior I logged on to look at dead people\u2019s profiles. Or to click through photographs of myself to remember where my time went. I didn\u2019t think it was appropriate to remain a member after graduation. Facebook was something you were to outgrow, like Tommy Girl perfume or AOL Instant Messenger. Five years since graduation, I use it more now than ever.<\/p>\n

As an elder user, I can say one thing with authority: When it comes to disseminating news about Facebook, few media are more effective than Facebook itself.\u00a0That\u2019s how I came to learn that longtime users like me are more likely to believe others happier than themselves. At least according to a study from Utah Valley University<\/a>.<\/span><\/span> The longer one has used Facebook, they found, the more likely he or she is to recall other people\u2019s positive posts: the stunning honeymoon in Greece of a girl you never really knew in high school\u2014and whose last name now looks, well, Greek; a list of very impressive graduate school acceptances<\/a><\/span><\/span>, the likes of which prompted one Awl writer to dash off a lesson in Facebook manners. The more acquaintances and strangers\u2014the more blanks, I\u2019d call them\u2014a user is \u201cfriends\u201d with, the more unmediated these positive images and the worse these suspicions. The lives of blanks look better.<\/p>\n

Utah\u2019s findings provided numbers for what so many feel, but perhaps haven\u2019t articulated. Many, I suppose, not including Facebook employees in Menlo Park, California. Facebook thinks that images of joy beget more joy. The dictum of the Facebook design team is \u201cserotonin\u201d\u2014the neurotransmitter responsible for feelings of happiness. \u201cThat’s our term for those little moments of delight you get on Facebook,\u201d design manager Julie Zhuo told <\/span>Fast Company<\/em><\/a><\/span><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c<\/span>We don’t want people to remember their interactions with Facebook,\u201d said director of design Kate Aronowitz. \u201cIt’s more like designing a plaza or a restaurant,\u201d said VP of product Chris Cox. \u201cThe best building is one where the people inside get it and work together and are connected. That connectivity is created by how everything is arranged.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

What Facebook doesn\u2019t acknowledge is that unless the shared material is neutral, the joy of it isn\u2019t usually shared. Personally, I love seeing baby pictures and I find wedding photos sociologically fascinating. But I know\u2014not least from the Awl<\/em>\u2014that not everyone else does. I suspect when I am loveless, barren, and twenty years older, I might not see the soft skull of an amusing little alien, but something I want very badly and envy. And I am certain that a neutral, several-years-old Onion<\/em> article that I posted brought far more delight to my Facebook friends than any little missive I have ever written and shared.<\/p>\n

But Facebook doesn\u2019t differentiate between types of sharing\u2014all bits of user activity build the company\u2019s base. To Facebook, all sharing is positive sharing, and so it makes sense that they believe, and that they can design their platform such that the sight of that banal cornflower blue banner might ring in, like a Pavlovian bell, the release of happy hormones. During a design meeting this past spring, \u201cserotonin\u201d was the word written on a post-it note stuck to the wall.<\/p>\n

And since this past spring, since May, the very word \u201cFacebook\u201d has<\/em> been clanging that bell, releasing an onslaught of some sort of happy hormone\u2014just not, exactly, in the way the design team had hoped. Rather it came by way of schadenfreude: the delight of watching Icarian overreaches and Icarrian falls. On May seventeenth, the evening before Facebook\u2019s much anticipated initial public offering, Zuckerberg and his team set Facebook\u2019s shares at $38 a piece, ultimately pricing it higher than the $28-$35 range<\/a><\/span><\/span> previously discussed. The day of the IPO, banks bought $11 billion worth of shares to prevent them from plummeting (and they billed Facebook for over $100 million in flotation fees). The Economist<\/em> spouted off with the headline, \u201cFacebook goes public: Not top of the pops\u201d and, seemingly wryly noted that, \u201cFacebulls\u201d thought Facebook had \u201cpitched the offering perfectly.\u201d The good Brits had a great deal of fun when five days later, the stock had fallen 16%, running a story that opened,<\/span> \u201cIt was supposed to be a coming-out party for the most eligible firm in the world\u201d under the headline, \u201cFacebook\u2019s flotation: That sinking feeling.\u201d The Guardian<\/em> called Facebook investors fools and comedian Andy Borowitz said: \u201cFor years, you\u2019ve wasted your time on Facebook. Now here\u2019s your chance to waste your money on it, too.\u201d (But, of course, no one wore their glee better than the <\/span>New York Post.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Our typical interactions with Facebook don\u2019t permit negative expression, so everyone seized the opportunity for schadenfreude in Facebook\u2019s falling stock. When it turned out that this delivery system for enviable announcements wasn\u2019t going to break every record for profitability, people went woozy with relief. Indeed,\u00a0the schadenfreude fairies are still rollicking, clanging the hell out of that bell.<\/p>\n

Eric G Wilson, author of Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck<\/em>, has rather lofty interpretations of schadenfreude and of why, more generally, humans are beguiled by anybody and everybody\u2019s bad news. He suggests the terrible attracts because it presents a fulfilling opportunity to empathize with the pain of others. Or because it\u2019s adaptive\u2014a moral can be salvaged from the ruination of others\u2019 ruin! Wilson entertains Jason Zinoman<\/a><\/span><\/span>\u2019s belief that the exhilaration provoked by confronting the taboo or the disreputable returns us to the innocence and emotional sensationalism of childhood. (Zinoman talks mostly about horror films, but his point seems to apply more generally, too.) He mentions the Natyasastra<\/em>, an ancient Sanskrit text from AD200-300, which argues that aesthetic renderings of grief pull us away from our preoccupation with ourselves. Wilson\u2019s own preferred interpretation is that \u201cthe morbid offers illuminations brighter than the sun.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, I don\u2019t know about that. The only thing schadenfreude spotlights is the preexistence of envy. Theories like these are too eager to explain away the fact that misery loves company, a truth so basic that you might find it crocheted upon a pillow.<\/p>\n

I should know. Perhaps because I am one of the longest users, I did, <\/em> initially, believe others led more colorful lives. I started to fantasize about putting negative news on Facebook. What if my wall became the wall of rejection? Wouldn\u2019t everyone take delight in my failings?\u00a0You\u2019ll look too pathetic<\/em>, a friend anxiously cautioned, which of course was the point, a point he thought lacked enough profundity to warrant the humiliation. Ultimately having to agree, I maintained enough of an egg-shell of self-respect to withhold the yolks of schadenfreude from oozing all over the internet.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ve heard tales of people cracking and I\u2019ve seen it once, on the wall of a blank, so to speak. Phoebe, as we\u2019ll call her, was someone I\u2019d taken a photography class with eight or so years ago. While I was snapping infantilizing images of my Nonie in her nightgown, she was photographing herself blowing her future husband. (Or could that have been someone else? I was in classes with several impossibly adult seniors when I was a freshman.) I\u2019d noticed her online one other time since her graduation, when her wedding pictures appeared on my newsfeed a few years ago. At the time, I spent a good two or three minutes idly clicking through a third of them, approving the tasteful blue shingles and subdued grayscapes of the Cape. Not more than a year or two later, it seemed, Phoebe announced her separation in her status. Dispatches of sympathy and support kept streaming through my newsfeed\u2014as many, if not more reactions than were elicited by her wedding photos. It was a truly bizarre spectacle. I\u2019m sure some peopled experienced schadenfreude but I felt fright. That sort of sharing felt like the reflex of someone truly helpless. What were her exact words?\u00a0X and I are separating? <\/em>I am happy to announce <\/em>X and I are getting divorced<\/em>? It wasn\u2019t just a charmless broken heart icon; it was a startlingly direct statement.<\/p>\n

Wondering just what the words were, I recently looked her up and scrolled through the cycles of career announcements and birthday wishes that kept materializing at the bottom of the screen. Cntrl F D-i-v-o<\/em> and s-e-p-a-r<\/em> and s-p-l-i-t<\/em> didn\u2019t pull up anything. Neither did the name of her husband, who we\u2019ll call Joe Codd. Three cycles of birthday wishes revealed only this:<\/p>\n

1. Happy birthday Phoebe!<\/em><\/p>\n

2. Happy birthday Mrs. Codd ;)! <\/em><\/p>\n

3. Happy birthday Phoebe!<\/em><\/p>\n

And I was comforted to see that her divorce, like her marriage, was no longer live.<\/p>\n

Francesca Mari<\/a> is an associate editor for <\/em>Texas Monthly and <\/em>has written for <\/em>The New Republic, <\/em>The New York Times Book Review, and other publications. She last wrote for the Daily on bookshelves<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was the 501st person to join Facebook. The inimitable Hatty Hong, number 499, urged me on from her desk across our freshman dorm room. I hardly used it the first few months because so few others were active, and as a senior I logged on to look at dead people\u2019s profiles. Or to click […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[9062,951,9046,331,9045,224],"class_list":["post-40480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-eric-g-wilson","tag-facebook","tag-fast-company","tag-internet","tag-schadenfreude","tag-technology"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLike: Facebook and Schadenfreude by Francesca Mari<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"October 30, 2012 \u2013 I was the 501st person to join Facebook. 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