Is the Internet A Happy Place?
By: Lily Crager
Tags: Social Media

An Investigation Into the Emotional State of the Internet

“This rat is so fat it got stuck in a sewer grate and had to be rescued”. The BuzzFeed News article was accompanied by a picture of a massive chihuahua-sized rat trapped in between the tiny holes of a sewer plate. It was though she was an infant emerging from the womb with a face of pure horror, just by looking at the picture you can hear the sound the animal was making. Wahhhh. Wahhh. Like a dolphin choking on polluted soda wraps. Wahhh. The free part of her fat body flailed like a flag blowing in the wind. A whole squad of firefighters geared up and came to the rat’s rescue. First responders said that “she had a lot of winter flab and was stuck fast at her hip — there was no going forward or back”. She was laying on her winter’s coat and the poor thing got trapped, like a plump, pampered, overfed cat getting caught in the doggy door, but more disgusting. It is ambiguous whether the article is a tragedy or a comedy. However, one thing is certain — the article is bizarrely entertaining.

The fat German sewer rat, BuzzFeed News Photo

The Internet is full of these wonderful distractions. Whether you are an excessive-selfie poster, a Netflix-binger or a proud 80-year-old grandma stalking your grandchildrens’ pictures and posting paragraph-length comments (please, please stop that, it’s embarrassing.), if you use the Internet then you know just how bizarre digital content can get. Casual google searches become black holes into the most absurd things. In a way, the Internet is one big web of weirdness. From cheeto challenges to Trump (a human cheeto)’s tweets to Ted Talks to helplessly obese rats, the Internet is one wild place. Indeed it is an entertaining place. But is it a happy place?

Look at the Internet like a friend. If each piece of this bizarre and endless content was a single thought, would your friend, the Internet, be a happy, sad or angry person? Considering humanity’s current relationship to the Internet which is intimate, personal, and incessant, it is important to question the condition of the Internet. And if our best friend is a bad influence, it is time to cut them out of the social circle.

THE EMOTION OF THE INTERNET

In Washington D.C. ARTECHOUSE, a digital art gallery, is hosting an exhibit called “Everything in Existence”. The Italian artist Fuse*, who created the exhibit, breaks limits of traditional thought by presenting new modes of expression through art, science, and technology. Using software data processors, the exhibit plays in real time different interactions across the Internet and between social network users. The software program that does this scouring of social networks is called “Amygdala”. The software gets its name “Amygdala” from the small part of your brain that is responsible for the perception of emotions. So when your boyfriend or girlfriend dumps you out of the blue, it is the amygdala that interprets the sadness of the situation and makes you feel like eating a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream while ugly crying and watching 10 Things I Hate About You on repeat.

The software “Amygdala” is the amygdala part of the brain for the Internet. It interprets social networks and translates all the sentimental signals and triggers into a particular feeling. So, if you post a tweet about your boyfriend or girlfriend dumping you, something maybe like, “@[insert ex-boyfriend or girlfriend’s name here], sometimes in relationships things aren’t meant to be, but most of the time it is because you are an asshole #singleandreadytomingle”, amygdala will digest that sub-280 character string and interpret it as anger.

Fuse* takes that technology to visually represent the emotion of the internet. It takes tweets and translates them into emotional data. So when you walk into the ARTECHOUSE exhibit you are entering into the bizarre abyss of social networks. At first, it is like a black hole. The same black hole you get sucked into when you do a casual google search. It is dark and you have no idea exactly what is going on or what you are looking for. Then tweets start to pop up around you. Like a flurry of the first snowflakes of a storm, they begin to fill the screen sky the way they refresh and fill your newsfeed. With each tweet, there is a colored light that represents an emotion. Yellow for happiness, blue for sadness, red for anger. What mix of colors would be displayed if your digital environment was scanned? Scroll through your twitter feed, log into your Facebook, click through your snapchat stories. What will you find? Angry break-up tweets, twitter storms about celebrity scandals, paragraph rants Facebook users post about their political opinion, snap stories of drunk kids jumping on tables. The exhibit is less concerned about the emotional effects it has on you, but rather how it affects the emotion of the Internet. In other words, how does the Internet feel about all of the content it holds? As I walked further into the blackness of the exhibit venturing further into the core of social network, I had a feeling that I was about to find out.

In the darkness of the exhibit, the anticipation could be felt. The viscosity of the air thickened like it had condensed into a thick syrup that made breathing slower. Everyone waited in goosebump wonder. Then like twinkling stars in the deep black sky, the tweets turned yellow. “It’s a girl!” “She said yes!” “It’s so important to know you should be happy and proud of who you are.” The screen lit a warm, yellow glow on my face. I was watching happiness.

ARTECHOUSE Fuse* Exhibit

And a constant happiness at that. Surprisingly, even when things in our real-world society are bad, the Internet remains happy.

“Amygdala even shows that amid the longest government shutdown in history, there is a still a great deal of happiness around us, especially because Winter Is Here — the first trailer for season eight of the Game of Thrones hit the interwebs three days ago. As #ForTheThrone continues its upward trend, the Amygdala installation displayed a visual representation of Twitter communities’ happiness, jumping from about 20 percent to about 70 percent, due to fan’s anticipation of the show, in a single day.” wrote Miabelle Salzano, a writer for The Architect Magazine which covered the exhibit.

The Internet, with all its fat rats and Facebook rants and Donald Trump tweets included, is a happy place. But like any human, moods swing back and forth like children propelling to the sky on swing-sets only to have gravity pull them back down. How can the emotion of the Internet, considering the mixed moodiness of the virtual content it holds, still be a happy yellow?

GOING VIRAL

Scroll, scroll, favorite. Scroll, scroll, reply. Scroll, scroll, keep scrolling. Scroll, scroll, repost. Why do we favorite some posts, scroll past others and only repost a few?

A study called “Social Transmission, Emotion, and the Vitality of Online Content”, done by Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman at the University of Pennsylvania, aims to answer the question of why certain pieces of online content are more viral than others. Their answer involves the emotional dynamic we feel as we scroll online.

After reading the fat rat getting stuck in a sewer article, I passed it along to five different people texting them “#relatable #spiritanimal”. And I am sure those five people passed it along to five more people, and voila! the fat rat went viral. The power of the Internet is the expanse of webbing communication it offers. Any random thing can become a trending hit in the manner of seconds. That is a truism of the Internet, but what is interesting to investigate is why certain things become viral, and how that plays into the overall emotion of the Internet.

To figure out the key to viral success, Berger and Milkman evaluated a dataset of New York Times articles and tested which ones made the “most-emailed list”. With a New York Times article being reposted every four seconds, they had an enormous amount of data to go off of. And their results showed a correlation between emotion and virality.

“More positive content is more viral than negative content, but the relationship between emotion and social transmission is more complex than valence alone, and is driven in part by arousal. Content that evokes either positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions characterized by high arousal is more viral. Content that evokes low arousal emotion (sadness) is less viral.”

Simply said, happiness makes us want to share. Spread the joy and speak the good news. In today’s online era, the way we do that is by socially sharing the happy things we see. Videos of cute puppies or soldiers surprising their families. These are the type of things that go viral because Internet users don’t want to plague others timelines with sadness, but uplift their followers and friends with a quick laugh, an endearing video, and at the very least, an honest smile.

This viral force of cognitive habit to repost what is good counters negativity on the Internet. And that pattern keeps the Internet a happy place. So while parents might warn that spending too much time on the Internet can be bad for you, emotionally speaking, the Internet may be safer and saner than the schoolyard or lunchroom. In fact, the Internet is actually the happiest place in the world.

The Internet might be a happy place because of the emotional charge of shared content, however, we must realize that this happiness is measured by software, not real human sensation. The happiness recorded is not true happiness, but a track record for happy content. The distinction I am making is that happiness on the Internet only runs screen-deep. Google isn’t going to give you a hug. Instagram will not lend its shoulder for you to cry on. The most you can hope for is a virtual double-tap.

THE DIGITAL ABSURD

On January 17th, 2014, a picture was posted on Instagram of Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. Like the twinkling lights of the ARTECHOUSE exhibit, the starry signals of happiness, hanging lanterns decorated the park backdropped by the city of brotherly love. The picture is overwhelmingly warm. Despite the barren, naked trees and empty benches, the picture is alive with a glow of hope. The software “amygdala” would digest this emotional literature as happiness and mark it with a highlighter yellow. Happiness. Hours later, Madison Holleran, the 19-year-old girl who posted the picture, jumped off the ninth-floor of a parking garage and killed herself.

Madison Holleran’s Instagram Photo

“One of the trickiest parts of social media is recognizing that everyone is doing the same thing you’re doing: presenting their best self. Everyone is now a brand, and all of digital life is a fashion magazine,” writes Kate Faran in her book What Made Maddy Run.

We have forgotten that the Internet, no matter how much happiness it feels or how much content it stores, is nothing but a cold-hearted machine. Lines of inanimate code and dead software. Except, we scroll through Instagram, stalk pictures of beautiful beaches and size-zero models and we believe in the power of Oz and giving that tin-man a heart. We believe that this fabrication is a reality, at the expense of acceptance.

In Albert Camus’ book Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays he describes the human “absurd”. This notion that our life is based on the illusion of meaning. Earning money, seeking love, setting goals, reading books, living life in general are just fillers for passing time. It is a sad perspective on the world, but it frames the current digital phenomena our society is obsessively stuck in.

“Likewise and during every day of an illustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it. We live on the future: “tomorrow,” “later on,” “when you have made your way,” “you will understand when you are old enough.” Such irrelevancies are wonderful, for, after all, it’s a matter of dying”, he writes. Our treatment of time is an example of illogical behavior we enact for the sake of our own sanity. We buffer reality with an emotional cushion, in Camus’s case this cushion is hope. The notion that “tomorrow” will bring some meaning. In our tech-driven world today that cushion is the digital screen.

We are clinging onto our phones like we cling onto that emotional cushion. And the only emotion that we will really feel as a result of that is not the happiness, but brokenness once the drape of illusion is pulled.

Camus continues, “Yet a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd.”

Hoping for tomorrow, is hoping one step closer to death. Yet, we dream and imagine the future because what’s the point of living a hopeless life? Having to present this ideal happiness on the Internet, is acknowledging that you are not capable of finding happiness in real life. But, we post and stream and consume hoping for some satisfaction, some sensational happiness. This behavior is absurd, still it is common practice. Illogical, but necessary to safeguard our fragile emotional nature.

Even if you find happiness in your real life. Fall in love, go on vacation, get a promotion, that bright yellow will be a muted gray in comparison to the colors of the Internet. Emotions are unfiltered, unenhanced, and human. So how can we search for them in a machine that at the heart is a construction.

We can’t, but we do. And that is the deadliness of the digital era we live in.