The wild,? fantasy world of Facebook

It may be true that Facebook is taking over the world — today, there are more than 500 million active Facebook users. T-Pain even got a Facebook tattoo recently.

And while it is now considered the norm to check Facebook daily, new research suggests that checking your friends’ Facebook pages may make you feel inadequate.

A Stanford research team found that people are more likely to keep negative emotions more private or hidden than their positive emotions, leading others to underestimate the prevalence of negative emotions among their peers — even well-known peers.

According to the research team, this perception of a lower prevalence of negative emotions in friends can then lead to lower life satisfaction.

If the conclusions are correct, social networking sites like Facebook can add to our perception that our friends are happier than we are, since people tend to post only the best parts of their lives on Facebook.

The movie “The Social Network” captures this dynamic. In the movie, Facebook is portrayed as beginning in the spirit of comparing people — specifically photos of female college students. The character of Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg starts “Facemash”, as it was originally called, to post pictures of all the girls at his university, giving people a place to publicly “rank” the photos against one another.

Naturally, Facebook has progressed from there, giving us a place to chat with each other and organize events. But it has also advanced by giving us a more sophisticated method of comparing ourselves to our friends. We can now compare each other based on our relationship statuses, how many wall posts we have, or even how often we get tagged in photos.

Facebook and other social networking sites have been accused of detaching people from each other and limiting real connection, replacing face-to-face social interactions with superficial, online connections.

If this is true, and real interactions have been replaced with fake ones, it follows that the fewer “real” things we know about our peers, the more room we have for making things up — like assuming they are happier than they actually are, and holding ourselves to this fantastical standard.

Women are especially at risk for developing complexes by comparing themselves to their friends on Facebook, since women, more often than men, tend to use social networking sites to demonstrate online affection, and share photos of friends and family.

On the other hand, men tend to use social networking sites more functionally, for activities such as posting news, information and task-oriented content — practices which would not lead them to compare themselves to their friends.

However, women and men are equally likely to broadcast their relationship status — about 84 percent of users do so.

The important thing to remember? Even though your friends’ lives may look perfect on their Facebook pages, don’t immediately assume their lives are that much better than your own — for all you know, they could be marveling at your own fantastical life on Facebook.

Sarah Dugan is a guest columnist for the Daily Tar Heel. She is a senior environmental health science major from Asheville. Contact her at sdugan@email.unc.edu.