Does Technology Affect Happiness?

By MATT RICHTEL JANUARY 25, 2012 12:59 PM January 25, 2012 12:59 pm
As young people spend more time on computers, smartphones and other devices,
researchers are asking how all that screen time and multitasking affects childrens
and teenagers ability to focus and learn even drive cars.
A study from Stanford University, published Wednesday, wrestles with a new question:
How is technology affecting their happiness and emotional development?
The answer, in the peer-reviewed study of the online habits of girls ages 8 to 12, is
that those who say they spend considerable amounts of time using multimedia
describe themselves in ways that suggest they are less happy and less socially
comfortable than peers who say they spend less time on screens.
The research raises as many questions as it seeks to answer, as the scientists readily
acknowledge. That is because the research was based on an online survey taken by
more than 3,400 girls, a sample that may well not be representative of the larger
population and, because the responses are self-reported, are not subject to follow-up
or verification by the researchers.
Among the crucial questions that the researchers were not able to answer is whether
the heavy use of media was the cause for the relative unhappiness or whether girls
who are less happy to begin with are drawn to heavy use of media, in effect retreating
to a virtual world.
But the researchers hypothesize that heavy use of media is a contributing factor to
the social challenges of girls.
The reason, say the researchers, is that on a basic, even primitive level, girls need to
experience the full pantheon of communication that comes from face-to-face contact,
such as learning to read body language, and subtle facial and verbal cues.
Humans are built to notice these cues the quavering in your voice, perspiration,
body posture, raise of an eyebrow, a faint smile or frown, said Clifford Nass, a
Stanford professor of communication who led the study. Social media, he added,
leaves the conversation two-dimensional. If Im not with you face to face, I dont get
these things. Or, if Im face to face with you and Im also texting, Im not going to
notice them.
The peer-reviewed study appeared Wednesday in Developmental Psychology, a
journal published by the American Psychological Association, as part of a series of
articles on interactive technology and human development. There is no analogous
study about how screen time affects boys.
The fact that the study was based on an online survey gave pause to some
academics. While they said the paper raised good questions, they also expressed
concern about giving it too much weight, given that the researchers were not able to
follow up with the survey subjects to get important context, including their family
circumstances, income or ethnicity.
Moreover, the limitations of the online survey did not even allow the researchers to
verify the ages of the girls.

Lyn Mikel Brown, an education professor at Colby College who studies girls behavior,
cautioned against reading too much into the research because so little is known about
the survey subjects.
It may well be, she said, that girls who seek out online relationships are girls who
otherwise might not feel social at all.
Finding like-minded people online and issues they can relate to and work on with
others can be incredibly important, she said.
But she also said the research should provoke further study about the connection
between time spent online and social development, and should provoke conversations
in families.
The clear message is also how important it is for parents to create opportunities for
girls to unplug, to live a balanced life, and increase quality face-to-face time with the
people important to them, Ms. Mikel Brown said.
Patricia Greenfield, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of
California, Los Angeles, who edited the article, said that that even though the authors
did not find that Internet use causes unhappiness among girls, the correlation that the
authors did find was very significant.
The research was based on an online survey of about 80 questions answered by 3,461
girls whom the scientists found by advertising in Discovery Girls magazine. The
researchers found that the average amount of media use by the girls surveyed was
6.9 hours per day, a figure that included reading as well as screen time. The average
amount of time spent in face-to-face social settings was 2.1 hours, a figure that did
not include classroom time.
Some parents of girls who are heavy Internet users said the research addressed
questions that they had been concerned about.
Lucy Gray, 45, who lives in Chicago and helps schools integrate technology, said her
daughter, Julia, 13, has for several years been a heavy consumer of media she
watches movies on her laptop, has an iPad, iPhone and a Nintendo DS portable game
machine. Ms. Gray said that Julia can have trouble picking up on subtle social cues in
face-to-face interactions, but she is not ready to blame her daughters heavy use of
technology.
In fact, she said, she thinks that, on the whole, the technology has helped her
daughter navigate the world socially.
Shed be missing out on an opportunity if she wasnt connected. Ms. Gray said.
At the same time, Ms. Gray said, she worries that her daughter, who is using Facebook
more, is playing out her social life online sometimes without the benefits of the full
emotional range that comes from face-to-face interaction.
Its a double-edged sword, Ms. Gray said of the social implications of social media.
Lena Garzarelli, 13, an eighth grader in Asheville, N.C., who spends as much as two
hours each day on Facebook, video chatting with friends and using other multimedia,
said that the technology, on the whole, has helped enrich her social life. But she said
that she felt it could be a poor substitute for face-to-face interaction.

She has had instances, she said, of serious miscommunication because her real
meaning was lost in text-based communications.
When people converse online, she said, they may not understand how I feel because
they cant see the emotion in my face and cant hear my voice.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/does-technology-affect-happiness/?_r=0

Can Technology Create Happiness?

Greg Satell APR 19, 2013 Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Aristotle once wrote that Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole
aim and end of human existence.
I think most people would agree. After all, who wants to be miserable? So its strange
that happiness is something we pay so little attention to.
When the OECD ranked the US #1 out of 36 countries in terms of household wealth,
but only 12th in life satisfaction, the response was nothing. No blue ribbon panels or
congressional committees or even a furrowed brow.
Compare that to the sanctimonious handwringing that accompanies a slight dip in
GDP or a weak jobs report or even a mildly troubling manufacturing index and it
becomes clear that, while we say we pursue happiness, we expend little effort to
create it, or even measure and monitor it. Is it any wonder than were ever more
prosperous but no more happy?
A growing awareness of the problem, along with some smart technology, may be lead
us to effective solutions.
A Personal Story
When I moved to Eastern Europe in the mid-nineties, the first thing I noticed was how
poor everyone was. It wasnt just incomes that were low, housing and food quality
were horrible (I got food poisoning on a regular basis that first year), streets were dirty
and stores lacked products.
Yet as I settled in, learned the local languages, travelled widely throughout the region
and visited people in their homes, I began to realize that many of them were
genuinely happy, even if their living conditions left much to be desired. Whats more,
they were generous, readily sharing what little they had. It took awhile, but I began to
realize why.

Much of what we need doesnt require money (or at least not much of it). Those who
dont go to fancy nightclubs can visit friends at home. A doctor doesnt need a
Mercedes to serve her community, just skill and caring. Favors can be traded, goods
bartered. Gifts, even modest ones (like the bottle of shampoo someone gave me one
Christmas), can be given and received enthusiastically.

Are You Happy? An App Tries To Raise Our Collective MoodS

The Clothesline Paradox

Tech visionary Tim OReilly calls the phenomenon I experienced in Eastern Europe the
Clothesline Paradox, based on an argument for alternative energy dating from the
70s. The basic concept goes like this: If you put your clothes in the dryer, the activity
gets counted as part of the economy, but if you hang it up on a clothesline, it just
disappears.

OReilly sees the dilemma as a fundamental confusion between value creation and
value capture. We find it easy to put a value on the activity of Goldman Sachs
and Morgan Stanley (except, of course, when they crash markets), but very difficult to
calculate the contribution of Tim Berners-Lee, who created the Web and gave it to the
world.

On an individual level, it is easy to see why a highly paid investment banker works a
90-hour week, but somewhat harder to quantify the pleasure and sense of
accomplishment a hacker gets from contributing code to Linux, Apache or a host of
other open-source platforms that have become crucial to the information economy.

Economists call situations like these externalities and try to account for them by
calculating their economic contribution, but the concept is a clumsy one. When a kid
creates a viral video and uploads it to YouTube, some of the money ends up
at Comcastor another Internet service provider in the form of higher usage fees. Who
gets the country club membership?

When Profit Doesnt Suffice

Anybody who has ever run a business knows that accounting has its limitations. You
try your best to make the numbers work, to allocate costs in a sensible way and to
reward true performance, but you know that ultimately good management is about
judgment, not calculation.
For example, as Irving Wladawsky-Berger describes in a recent blog post, when
formulating IBMs Internet strategy in the 90s, he had to look beyond direct revenues
because much of the benefit would be thinly distributed across the company. Narrowly
looking at the profit and loss of the Internet initiative would have seriously damaged
the well being of the enterprise.

This is often known as the profit paradox. Just as societies who excessively focus on
GDP can harm the general well being, managers who pursue only profits often earn
less for their enterprise. Once we start pretending that what we cant easily measure
doesnt exist, we begin to sow the seeds of our own destruction.

Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch called the notion of formulating business
strategy on the basis of shareholder value the dumbest idea in the world. Can the
notion of basing a societys policy priorities on economic value be far behind?

The Quest For A Happiness Indicator

In order to fill the gaps left by GDP and other economic indicators, many organizations
are beginning to try to formulate a broader approach through the concept of Gross
National Happiness.
The effort, while far from uniform, is already fairly widespread. The UN has proposed a
measure that incorporates 9 indicators, the OECD has developed an alternative
approach that aggregates 11 metrics, the UKs conservative Prime Minister David
Cameron has promoted a well-being index and even the small city of Somerville, MA
has a happiness project.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the tech community has joined the happiness effort. John
Havens has launched the H(app)athon project which seeks to hack happiness by
combining questionnaires with sensor data collected through smartphones over a two
week period.
The app correlates its sensor data with the questionnaire responses to discover the
behavior patterns that reflect happiness, such as whether youre happier when youre
more active and whether youre stressed at certain times of the day or week. The data
will then be fed through an algorithm that will both give assessments and make
recommendations.
Should We Optimize Happiness?
There is no doubt that happiness is becoming a movement and a welcome one at
that. However, there is one thing that nags at me: By quantifying happiness, can we
avoid losing sight of its true value?
What most surprised me when I arrived in the former Eastern Bloc was that many
people were happy even under the failed Communist system. Not because they liked
the system or that they would like to return to it, but because they had many of the
things required for happiness, such as good friends, strong families and community
ties.
So while happiness is certainly a worthy personal goal, it could be an unrealistic one
for societies. Maybe what we really should be shooting for is dignity, which Immanuel
Kantdefined as the right for people to be treated as ends in themselves, rather than
as means to an end.
In other words, our personal well-being stems from having both the means and the
freedom to choose how we wish to seek fulfillment. The truest measure of happiness,
after all, is the right to define it for ourselves.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregsatell/2013/04/19/can-technology-create-happiness2/