Swarm Creativity Blog

Thanks to Martin Wikelski and his colleagues at Max Planck Institute and University of Konstanz for inviting me to give a talk about "whether measuring emotions increases happiness"? If you would like to hear the answer, and see how the "Social Compass" might help in achieving this goal, watch the talk here .

Navigating human emotions can be extremely difficult. Just ask politicians such as former US Vice President Joe Biden who was hit by a firestorm of protests by getting too touchy-feely with supporters, or US senator Elizabeth Warren who ran into unexpected criticism for claiming Native American ancestry. While trying to behave rationally, they become victims of their emotions. In an interview Linus Torvalds said “I absolutely detest modern "social media"—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. It's a disease. It seems to encourage bad behavior.”…. “When you're not talking to somebody face to face, and you miss all the normal social cues, it's easy to miss humor and sarcasm”…”The whole "liking" and "sharing" model is just garbage. “ In our research we are developing a “Social Compass” that helps individuals navigate their emotional world, just like Google helps a person to navigate the relational world of facts and science. Just like Google Maps shows

It seems there is a digital divide of a special kind between the US and the rest of the World. Using Google ngrams and Google trends as my cristal ball, I checked what people are searching most. First I looked at their "hope", "fear", "love" and "money" over the last 200 years on ngrams worldwide. The result is shown below. "Hope" has been decreasing for the last 200 years, as has "fear", which makes sense, they go together and most of the time “we hope it is not as bad as we fear”. More interesting is the decrease in our search for "love", and increase in the search for "money", reaching its peak in the 1940s, tampering off since then, while "love" has been picking up recently. Drilling down on the last fifteen years, Google trends shows that while "love" matters more than "money" (after all money is just a proxy to buy love), happiness and money are close twins: