There's No Such Thing as Free Lunch but Envy among Young Facebookers

Facebook has quickly infused across cultures worldwide to become a common household term for diverse spectra of netizens, especially youngsters. Inherently, interactive in nature, Facebook provides a common cyber enabled platform for online interactions with social friends, living across the world. However, despite its merits, users also experience certain disadvantages, which include but are not limited to rise in feelings of social comparison, decline in self-esteem, contentment and general subjective well-being. This work aims to determine the role of Facebook in spreading envy and identify factors that trigger such emotions. Due to abductive nature of the study, we used pilot interviews and consulted relevant literature to formulate hypotheses. Further, we used deductive approach and conducted a survey. The results showed that frequent use of Facebook, particularly passive following is main predictor of envy, and social interaction is the biggest cause for development of envious feelings in Facebook users. However, insignificant variation was found while investigating relationship between envy and factors, such as pretentiousness, time spent, accomplishment, everything in life, likes on posts, popularity across genders, marital status and genre.