This week I came across some interesting information produced by Facebook and its “Gross National Happiness” prototype app. It is a little awkward to think that the goal of this app is to analyze happiness in Facebook and from there, estimate the “World happiness index” to compare which countries are happier than others. Here’s the graph of 18 countries that are currently included:
What does it mean to find out how happy people are on Facebook (positive/negative posts)? As a population study it is pointless. I will not get into the specific demographics attracted to Facebook, specially in less developed countries. I’d rather look at this information with the assumption that we are only looking at the Facebook world population, forgetting about non Facebook users. Consequently we are now comparing the Facebook Republic of Argentina to the Democratic Facebook Republic of India and so on.
Ok, now that the demographics are out of the way, does it mean that Italian Facebook users are happier than Indian Facebook users? The answer is no. It means something we (Abraham Harrison and everyone in the world) have known for a long time: Different cultures have different behaviors. If that is true with everything else, why wouldn’t it be true with social media!? The truth is that different cultures adapted to social networks in a different way, use it for different purposes and have different views on security and openness. When it comes down to it, this graph is comparing oranges to apples. Basically, what this all means is not that Facebook users are necessarily happier in certain countries, it means that they use it for different purposes.
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