The other day I was talking to someone on twitter and a really good point was brought up: Social media is a place where people perform happiness.

Think about it —People post about birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, vacations, and witty comments/quotes. It’s rare that you see people posting updates about their depression, funerals, and failures (unless it’s about overcoming them). There are obviously exceptions, but I think it’s safe to say that by far the majority of posts are describing happy aspects of life. I’ll post a million pictures of babies and weddings, but I sure won’t announce funerals on social media (let alone post photos)…unless it’s someone famous. RIP Mom isn’t something I’ll say on Facebook unless lots of time has passed.

In other words, social media feels like a never ending high-school reunion. No one talks about the crushing mortgage payments, or their children’s problems, or failing marriages, or the job they hate. You present your best side and keep smiling.

Earlier this year a study was conducted by a couple universities in Germany, where they tracked Facebook user’s emotional states. The study showed that many Facebook users suffered from envy, jealousy, depression and frustration caused by using Facebook. What the study found was that users compare their life to their friends’ life, based on Facebook updates. If all you ever see is happy updates about career, love life, vacations etc, normal life can seem pretty inadequate.

However, people selectively choose what they post on Facebook. We don’t post the mundane, the truly sad. Therefore we shouldn’t be comparing ourselves to what we see on social media, because it’s filtered happiness .

This brings me to my main point: Maybe we should all be more aware of this? Maybe there needs to be a new kind of “social media literacy”? Right now, “social media literacy” is a term that refers to the ability to keep a healthy, critical eye on what you see on social media. Its only concern is truthfulness. In other words - don’t trust everything on the internet. It’s a natural extension of the old “media literacy” education (don’t trust everything you see on tv/radio/books/magazines/newspapers).

The current understanding of “social media literacy” is inadequate. Why? Because the Facebook updates by friends are probably 100% factual. Truth is not at issue. It’s not like a regular internet article, where you take the information with a grain of salt, research some background material, and draw your own conclusions. You don’t need to doubt that your friends got married, or got a promotion, or had a baby. So we don’t doubt the truthfulness of a single update, but rather the completeness of the timeline as a whole. It’s a macro level literacy.

A Facebook wall is not a diary. It doesn’t capture all the major events in someone’s life. It’s the happiness that’s left after a life has been edited for public consumption.

I’m not sure what to call this type of literacy, but I’m not about to coin a new phrase here because that seems silly. What I’ll say is this: if you start to feel disappointed in your life compared to what you see on social media, remember that what you see is only half the story.