Could Twitter predict and control Happiness?
This month Urban Spaces Group managed to work out how happy the nation was by tracking aggregated comments on terms like 'nervous' on social media sites.
They used the results to create what they call an ‘Anxiety Index’ and demonstrated that it could be used to more accurately predict dips in the share index than traditional methods.
The question isn’t whether Twitter et al can track what’s going on with national mood, but rather to what extent and whether they can exert any control over it?
Google over a year ago demonstrated that they could predict changes in house prices, while studies in Italy and Germany also showed that search traffic could predict changes in unemployment and afford a more accurate way of tracking consumer prices than the traditional ‘Consumer Confidence Index’
While it’s true that correlation does not equal causation (otherwise pirates would be responsible for global warming); the share price of both Apple and BP show that peoples’ emotional feelings towards the company affect the price. Imagine if your computer could tell you it’s time to sell your shares or draw your money out of the Icelandic Bank as social media activity has reached fever pitch and the chance of them recovering are bleak. It also turns into a self-fulfilling prophesy as people standing in line to withdraw their savings tweet about it causing a run on the bank.
It’s not just financial data either, imagine instead of having an ‘Anxiety Index’ you have a ‘Happiness Index’ of positive comments weighted against negative comments from all social media. You could show trends and changes in national happiness; how much more positive are people when the sun is shining? What effect does the World Cup have on national mood? What is the happiness boost of the Olympics compared to economic cost? Are we happier under a coalition?
This is beyond reach in the immediate future, but nevertheless, the wealth of information gathered by Google et al holds a whole lot more value than simply how better to market to us, it predicts changes in prices of consumer goods to national anxiety.
More importantly it could also give large scale social media networks like Twitter and Facebook the ability to direct national mood. What if Facebook delay the distribution of negative comments, or simply make them less visible, would this increase happiness? If Google pushes negative news stories to lower down the search results will this make everyone happier? With the ability to ‘control the content’ and ‘index the content’ they could try it, test it and track it, and what’s more, affect share prices in their favour.
All of that said, the growing range of social networks limits the control one entity has. We probably have more to worry about with spammers gaming the system than Google. But maybe you should think before updating your Twitter that you’re feeling good this morning.
