A visual representation of hate-following someone online
Finally, science has proven that all those dumb-dumbs you’re friends with on Facebook have a purpose. All those idiots, those morons from back home – that girl who’s inexplicably just qualified as a nurse, even though you remember, vividly, her sitting on a sofa at university bemoaning her period, saying, “Honestly, Joel, it’s like a tap,” which makes you think she should be seeking urgent medical help rather than qualifying in it. That makes you hope to God you never get sick again, lest she come to your bedside and hiss in your ear, “A valve has popped inside of me and now I’m spouting like a sewage drain.”
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All these people have a function. And that function is making you feel better about your own dumb-dumb awful life. Because this month, an Ohio State University study into social networks found that, when people are in a bad mood, they’re more likely to linger on the social media profiles of people who are worse off than them: the poor, the damaged, the trainee nurses with tap-like vaginal discharges.
They found this by taking a group of 168 students, dividing them into two, putting one lot in a bad mood (they asked them to do a test and then told them all they did “terribly”) and one lot in a good mood (ditto, but said they did “excellently” – who knew mood manipulation was so easy?) then asked them to look at some fake social media profiles they’d made up on a thing called “SocialLink”.
A selection of profiles on “SocialLink”
I love shit like this. I love that the Morrisons own-brand Dr. Pepper is called “Dr. Pop” (‘It’s poppin’ with fruit flavour!’). I love on Coronation Street when they go to the bar and say, “Pint of lager, please,” because they’re not allowed to say brand names. This is what this is: academics, clearly not allowed to use actual Facebook profiles for actual academic reasons, having to invent an entire social network just for the purpose of their study.
And it’s a rubbish one: names like “Raymond Doty” and “Phillip Mulkey”, with pixelated-like-the-bloke-in-Doom user profiles and a five-point rating for wealth (signified by a dollar sign) and hotness (signified by a heart). I like to imagine the design meeting for that: “Yo, can we make this mangled face slightly less hot? Make those – no, Brian, you’re not listening – make those distorted pixels look a bit poorer.”
But the point is the findings of the study, which were as follows: overall, people spent more time on the profiles of those rated richer and more attractive, but those in the negative mood group spent more time wallowing on the profiles of the poor and the ugly. In conclusion, as the study’s co-author Benjamin Johnson says, “Generally, most of us look for the positive on social media sites. But if you’re feeling vulnerable, you’ll look for people on Facebook who are having a bad day or who aren’t as good at presenting themselves positively, just to make yourself feel better.”
This is brilliant, because it fully endorses my own not-proven-by-a-fake-social-media-platform-and-a-university-study theory – that following someone on social media just because you hate them is important for the heart, soul and everything in between. There is, of course, a whole gamut of emotion between pity and hate, and looking at the profile of someone who’s desperately trying to sell a race car bed on the Facebook community page for Blaengarw, South Wales (“€30 only!! Mattress barely soiled!!!) is completely different from poring over the tweets of someone you hate from afar. But I think they scratch the same itch. I think they tingle the same knot of synapses in the brain that only light up at the Twitter wailing of others. Digital schadenfreude, if you want.
Tiny impulses of delight garnered from social media is a definite Thing. Earlier this year, a Frontiers of Human Neuroscience study found that gaining Facebook “likes” or Instagram “likes” or retweets, or whatever – getting those #numbers, basically – lit up the reward centre in your brain. Scientists from Berlin’s Freie Universitat scanned the brains of 31 Facebook users as they looked at pictures of themselves accompanied by positive captions – and yeah, essentially, we’re all big dumb parakeets now enamoured with our phones instead of tiny mirrors.
But it proves social media has the ability to alter our mood and our wellbeing. And it works the other way: when I see someone publicly sounding off about an airline mis-booking them on a 5AM flight, I get delighted. When I see someone sincerely say the words, “Really, Twitter?” I get mad in a way that gives me energy. And god, when I see someone doing a manual retweet of that picture of some-pigeons-about-to-drop-the-most-fire-album and adding “BRILLIANT” or “TWEET OF THE DAY”, I feel a foot taller, like I can shoot fire from my very fingertips. Everyone is awful and it’s brilliant to watch.
I’m not alone; I can’t be alone. I know someone who has an entire alternate Twitter account, locked down like Alcatraz, which they use to follow purely the people who infuriate them with their bad opinions. I know several other people who check in on people they don’t follow just to see if they are still being wrong. “Yes,” they will say, in e-mail or over WhatsApp, linking me to a deeply buried tweet of theirs, a screen-shotted glimmer of someone else’s outrage. “They are still being wrong.”
So there it is: a bit of hate (if you don’t want to think of it as “hate”, think of it as “aggressively enjoying the fact that you are not someone else”) can be good for you.
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