Results tagged “emotion” from Birmingham Post - Lifestyle Blog

A cross-party group of Christian MPs released a report this week that suggested that people were going wrong in striving to be happy. While the non-believers may question their motives, and yes they did suggest that an "erosion of religious values" was a cause of unhappiness, are we as a society happy? How can we tell?

It seems that social scientists measure happiness by just asking people to rate their happiness on a scale of 1-10. Governmental scales take more variables into account, crime figures, health, and even economics. Clearly, while money doesn't make you happy you need enough for the grind of existence not to make you unhappy.

There's an almost standard move to blame "progress". Each new invention ties us more closely to our employers meaning we can't even hide. Each new labour-saving device ends up creating more work, as anyone who's attempted to clean a smoothie maker will testify. At the other end, there are claims (like here on the New Generation Arts blog) that technology will be what sets us free.

But what if technology could help, in the first instance at least let us work out just how happy we are. The measurements used now don't really get near enough for me, they're too general too subjective, and too slow to allow us to work out what effect events have.

These days there is much more information floating around that can be used to help measure happiness, we can look a news headlines, what people write on their blogs, even the "ambient information streams" that are tweets. So, is it possible to snatch a bunch of this as it passes, look at how people are feeling and work out if Birmingham is happy?