According to Facebook’s own Fan Page, they are using an index to measure how happy people are in the United States. Your status updates are what help them to measure whether, as a whole country, we’re feeling positive or negative. Their studies so far have shown that there is a pattern. As holidays approach we seem to show that we’re happier and more positive. National holidays like Thanksgiving and the 4th of July, religious holidays like Christmas and then social holidays like Halloween have given the biggest spikes on the positive side. The most negative days in the past two years were on June 22, 2008 when the Asian stock market crashed (also when actor Heath Ledger passed away) and on June 25, 2009 when pop legend, Michael Jackson, passed away. It’s nice to know that in a nation as big as the US we tend to feel the same emotions. We can only suspect that this would create sympathy from one stranger to the next.
Facebook has said there is no reason to worry about your privacy though. They are not keeping tabs on you personally. There is no human, with an unlimited pot of coffee, sitting behind a desk scrolling through millions of personal updates. The in-house software has been given certain keywords to pick up on when scrolling through all the information. These keywords were collected by social psychologists. For instance, when searching for positive feelings, the software picks up on words like “happy”, “yay” and “awesome”. On the flip side, when searching for the negative feelings, the software picks up on keywords like “tragic”, “sad” and “doubt”.
Right now the software is only productive when measuring the English-speaking US. Facebook has said more countries and languages may be added in the near future. For now, they are naming this the “Gross National Happiness” index. Positively speaking it is nice to know that we’ve had more happy days due to our national, social and religious holidays vs. the two most negative days which related to the deaths of a legend and a market.
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