Facebook and longevity

The online world is a magical realm of freeze-dried wisdom, perfect social lives, and products so amazing you could build a new universe with them. Yet as bountiful as it appears to be while some people spend most of their lives in the online world others rarely venture there. Yet again the internet has divided us neatly in two and, like the dwarves and the elves of Middle Earth, the onliners and the offliners maintain a simmering disregard for the ways of the other. Now to add fuel to the divide a new study suggests that being an onliner, and specifically using social media, might actually help you live longer but read on…there’s an important wrinkle to come.

The study used data gathered from 12 million people in California and their data was matched against records from the California Department of Public Health. All of the subjects were born between 1945 and 1989. The researchers studied online activity and then compared it to health outcomes. All comparisons were made between people of similar age and gender.

Overall the study showed that in any given year, compared to someone who does not use Facebook, a Facebook user was 12 per cent less likely to die. Digging deeper though, the researchers looked at numbers of friends, numbers of photos posted, and messages sent.

They found that people with large social networks, in the top 30-50 per cent, lived longer than those with the smallest networks. So far it is looking as though Facebook works wonders but on further analysis it emerges that people who post more photos with friends, suggesting their offline life is integrated with their online life, have the greatest longevity. Interactions that were online-only, such as messages and wall posts, were not linearly liked to a longer life. Additionally, Facebook users who accepted the most friend requests lived the longest but there was no benefit for those who initiated the most requests.

So what does it all mean? It might be that more popular are more likely to live longer but it certainly shows that the value of the online world is when it serves to support and reinforce what happens in the real/offline world. The internet is a wonderful branching of human intellect but it needs to be grounded to have true value.

Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences