Can Facebook Make You Sad? By Justin Mullins Analysis

Can Facebook Make Us Feel Better?

“Can Facebook make us feel better?” Justin Mullins tries to prove in his article “Can Facebook Make You Sad?” which was published in The New York Times in February 6, 2014 that facebook doesn’t make us feel any better. Mullins clarifies in his article that facebook make us sad and every time we log on facebook we start to feel sad. He used evidences, statistics, and researches to prove his point of view. Although there’re some agreeable ideas in his article that must be agreed on, however there’re some ideas must be examined carefully.

Mullins has some of the points that are not argued by two. When he said “Facebook connects families across continents, friends across the years and people around the world.” And when he said “Facebook is an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social contact.” So throughout facebook you can reach your family across the world or your friends from all over the world. Facebook is one from many sources that fulfill the social contact need between humans in the world, but it is the most valuable source among the sources of social contact. So these two ideas no person on the planet would question them.

Mullins has used a kid experience that has become sad when he saw some photos about starving people and poor people in order to prove his claim. This is a Hasty Generalization logical fallacy. It’s just a kid felt sad when he saw the photos of the starving and the poor people so why generalizing that every person log on facebook feel the same as this kid not every person see these photos. Mullins also had another fallacy when he stated the story of the kid and stated that this kid has lost his innocence when his parents let him use facebook, but this kid can lose his innocence without even logging on facebook, if he just watched the new on the TV or watched some war crimes on other websites he could lose his innocence