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posted by martyb on Tuesday February 12 2019, @05:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-about-twitter? dept.

Quitting Facebook Might Make you Happier, but Dumber: Study:

Those who managed to abstain from Facebook had at least one hour or more of extra free time and reported marginally better moods, though, notably, not enough to support the theory that heavy social media use makes people miserable. They were also five to 10 percent less polarized on political issues than their control group who remained on Facebook throughout the study.

But when it came to factual knowledge of current events — the Facebook-breakers scored lower than they had prior to deactivation.

Abstract:

The rise of social media has provoked both optimism about potential societal benefits and concern about harms such as addiction, depression, and political polarization. We present a randomized evaluation of the welfare effects of Facebook, focusing on US users in the run- up to the 2018 midterm election. We measured the willingness-to-accept of 2,844 Facebook users to deactivate their Facebook accounts for four weeks, then randomly assigned a subset to actually do so in a way that we verified. Using a suite of outcomes from both surveys and direct measurement, we show that Facebook deactivation (i) reduced online activity, including other social media, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and (iv) caused a large persistent reduction in Facebook use after the experiment. We use participants' pre-experiment and post-experiment Facebook valuations to quantify the extent to which factors such as projection bias might cause people to overvalue Facebook, finding that the magnitude of any such biases is likely minor relative to the large consumer surplus that Facebook generates.

Reference:
Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, and Matthew Gentzkow, The Welfare Effects of Social Media (pdf); National Bureau of Economic Research.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @09:08PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @09:08PM (#800320)

    To be fair to educators it is pretty difficult to have students recreate the entirety of human knowledge...

    The real problem with education is that we have the very limited "fast track" of honors/advanced classes and "all others". Students shouldn't be put into such linear tracks where a bad grade in PE will prevent them from being able to take honors english/math/whatever.

    It is not a small problem to solve. Students should have individual portfolios and teachers should do a lot more facilitating than lecturing so that if one student doesn't understand a topic they can focus on it or switch to something unrelated instead of having to re-take the entire year just to patch up a few sections.

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  • (Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Wednesday February 13 2019, @12:17PM

    by bobthecimmerian (6834) on Wednesday February 13 2019, @12:17PM (#800568)

    On that topic, if you haven't read or watched videos from Alfie Kohn about the way education should work, it's worthwhile. He didn't pioneer any of the ideas he presents, he's just collecting and explaining other people's work. One of the examples he gives is having a third grade class design a zoo. No grades, no homework, no lectures. They learn maps because they have to lay out the zoo. They learn mathematics because they have to calculate square footage (or square meters), food and water volumes for the animals, perimeters for fencing, and budgeting. They learn biology because they have to learn the food, temperature, waste disposal, and other requirements for the species they choose. The learn marketing and business for the brochures, advertising, and so forth. And they learn language and communication doing their research and making presentations with their ideas to each other and so forth. Different parts of the zoo project, in the order the students choose, would be the only thing they do at school for months.

    That's totally different from the intellectual wasteland my kids are attending. Their teachers and administrators have the best intentions, but the structured classes, lectures, topics taught without context, grades, and prizes for good performance and quiet obedience are killing their interest in learning. It's everything bad about when my parents went to school (except for the beatings) dialed up further.