Week 9:The Internet and Happiness

This week’s reading focused on the concepts of what the relationship is between the internet and happiness, and how it influences happiness. The author describes the internet as being a mixed-bag result in terms of what it has done to society. On the positive side, the author describes the internet as having allowed communication with another person to become a lot faster and more efficient. However, at the same time the author states that there is an increasing use of SNS life as a means to fill the void in life that was used to be filled by more closely connected personal relationships. In a way, society is still adjusting to provide the support that people feel has been lost. It was interesting to note how people nowadays are trying to use their online life as a means to portray their inner personality, for example, as cited in the reading, as in Second Life.

This week’s experiment allowed me to see that I have overwhelmingly used the methods online that make me happy than the methods that I used offline to make myself happy. The websites that I used on the day I focused on my online methods, Facebook, Youtube, and Google, I had repeated checked to see if there was any updates on the news, status updates or videos almost every hour. On the day that I spent offline, I interacted with friends that I had not actually contacted in an offline way in a while. Eating lunch together and watching a movie with Ben and Alex allowed me to see that although I may use online methods to communicate with them almost every day, I rarely have face to face contact with them anymore. I guess the answer to this lay with the fact that I have come to see my online ways of staying in touch as equal to my offline, due to the fact, as the author states, that I find SNS a means to make my relationships more in tone with the face-paced life that I have. The cons of the online happiness would appear that I have seemed to have made some friendships less personal, while the pros would be that I have made them more efficient time-wise. Although I come to use my online method to feel the void of happiness, I would say that the offline part of the experiment felt nice in the sense that it was a more personal, face to face contact for a day.