How Happy Is the Internet?

[JBeukema]

It's not so hard to figure out if one particular person--or a small group of people--is happy or sad. Psychologists hand out questionnaires or conduct interviews. But when it comes to gauging the happiness of an entire society, things aren't so simple. Applied mathematicians Peter Dodds and Christopher Danforth of the University of Vermont in Burlington wondered if the Internet could help. The duo focused on two popular outlets for personal expression: blog posts and song lyrics. Besides providing large slews of data, the researchers believed that people are more honest in personal writings than during formal psychological tests. The scientists analyzed sentences from 2.4 million blogs, which were collected by a Web site called www.wefeelfine.org. The site searches blogs across the world for versions of the phrase "I feel" and then records the entire sentence. For songs, Dodds and Danforth downloaded more than 230,000 lyrics from Searchable Lyrics Database - HotLyrics.net, a searchable online database of song lyrics submitted by volunteers.
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Popular music has become less happy since 1960--a 10% drop. Most of the decreases happened between 1961 (6.7) and 1980 (6.2). Fewer singers are crooning about "love" now and more are shouting about "hate" and "pain," the scientists report. When they analyzed musical genres, the researchers found that genres haven't changed much over time, but new, less happy genres, such as punk and heavy metal, have become popular and brought lyric scores down. "All-4-One [an R&B group] still uses the word 'love' a lot in their songs," Danforth says. "But [hard rock group] Metallica doesn't use it much at all." The Vermont scientists are now studying Twitter feeds to watch how emotions change within social networks in real time.
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How Happy Is the Internet? -- Torrice 2009 (803): 3 -- ScienceNOW