Read more: 鈥�How to be happy: Putting well-being on the agenda鈥�
Can we tell how happy people are from their online activity 鈥� and can living digitally actually make you happier?
HAPPINESS is hard enough to pin down in the real world, but in the digital realm, the stumbling blocks are more fundamental.
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Data is mostly created by a self-selecting group of bloggers, tweeters or social network fiends 鈥� and people may alter the extent of their online interactions depending on mood. 鈥淎re they more likely to distance themselves from Facebook when they are unhappy?鈥� wondered Julie Kane Ahkter and Steven Soria of Stanford University, California, who analysed . Equally tricky is the desire for online popularity, which can lead people to fake happiness online to keep friends.
But the most basic problem is correlating online sentiment with real-world emotions. Sentiment has begun to be correlated with real-world opinion 鈥� but not yet emotions. For example, Bernardo Huberman鈥檚 group at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, by analysing the volume of responses and their sentiments on Twitter.
Similarly, work by Noah Smith at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows an 80 per cent correlation between .
But can living digitally actually increase happiness? Maybe. Feng-Yang Kuo of the National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan, found that bloggers have an improved sense of 鈥渟ubjective well-being鈥� (a proxy for happiness?) from the self-disclosure afforded by blogs.
New life-logging technologies, which document the minutiae of daily life, can improve memory in dementia sufferers. And Anind K. Dey, also at Carnegie Mellon, has reported early findings that . Who wouldn鈥檛 be happy with that?
