The Gross National Happiness Index and Facebook. Where the dark art of noetic science meets social networking.
Ever since I read ‘The Lost Symbol’, the latest bestseller of Dan Brown, noetic science has raised to the top of my personal chart of hot topics. Noetic science or noëtics, often called ‘the future of science’, basically studies the power of the human spirit in terms of thoughts, feelings and words. Behind this philosophic approach, the Princeton University presents the most practical experiments that provide hard facts concerning the dark art. The noetical research department developed forty Random Number Generators and placed them in different places around the world. These devices can actually analyse the human mass conscience and are the main tools for the Global Consciousness Project. Right before the sad events of September 11, 2001 for example, the RNGs measured immense inconsistencies compared to the regular mass conscience. As if the world already knew which terrible incidents were about to happen…
“What the hell has all this incoherent blabber to do with social networking sites?”, I hear you wonder. Yet, the relationship is quite clear: the Web 2.0 and the gathering of people who share their personal opinions on social networking sites gave us an excellent tool to explore this mass conscience. Thanks to the internet we are the first generation of mankind who can know with only one click how people in Myanmar live, what kind of food the Congolese eat or the fact that a butterfly has 12,000 eyes. Social networking sites combine us into one giant community as the global village is finally born.
And that’s when I discovered that Facebook is studying the positive and negative words used in status updates of Australian, Canadian and British users. Consequently, Facebook has its own mini-version of the Princeton Global Consciousness Project and contributes to the Gross National Happiness Index. The latest data show that Christmas, New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day as well as weekend days present the happiest moments of our lives. Certainly, these data are not as sensational as the Princeton findings, but also give a certain insight into the human conscience. Finally, I can only hope that I stimulated your interest for the weird world of noetics by sharing this philosophical approach on social networking sites.
Sources
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-team/continuing-
our-study-of-happiness/375901788858
