In pursuit of happiness on social media

I got a snapshot of the darkness within social media. The mass provocation feels like organised crime or some brazen form of online guerrilla warfare.

When I was viciously trolled on Twitter, I resorted to the judicious response of no response, following the popular memo, “don’t feed the troll”. So, a collision course was cautiously averted.

Yet, I got a snapshot of the darkness within social media. The mass provocation feels like organised crime or some brazen form of online guerrilla warfare. They emerge like a swarm of locusts from nowhere and target one individual at a time. As a group they thrive on a deep sense of belonging, acting upon group norms. Perhaps deep down, we never really evolved from our hunter-gatherer days. We still hunt in packs.

“Where do you live?” asks a troll. No matter how brave you are, you pause momentarily to think about the broader implications of this more-than-a-veiled threat. Then you remember that this is how women have been targeted on social media. Nothing extraordinary about it. You move on to yet another tweet.

With the volume of social media activity, the diversity of chatter, and the constant ebb and flow of what’s trending, it is hard to unscramble the noise. We wonder if the tweets and posts make us truly happy. Whether the one who posts is happier than the one who passively scrolls. Researchers have often cautioned that mindless scrolling on social media could make us unhappy. However, a recent longitudinal study advanced a contrarian view. Spread over nine years, the study found no correlation between the well-being of adolescents in Germany and their social media usage. Another three-week study on adolescents aged 13-15 found that browsing may result in positive, negative, or no effects among individuals, based on a range of dispositional, developmental, social, and situational factors. In short, it depends.

It goes without saying that our use of Instagram or Facebook cannot merely be an exercise in self-inflicted pain. It must offer some joy, however fleeting it might be, like that piece of chocolate you relished so much knowing that you may regret it later. How else could we explain the more than 2 hours of average daily usage of social media.

The notion of happiness is more than just a basic human emotion. Psychologies, sociologists, economists and now governments are preoccupied with the idea of happiness. In the UAE, improving happiness has been the driving force behind citizen services. Happiness has become central to governance and how we gauge progress. By that count, social media has implications on our overall happiness given that it is so embedded in our daily life. Despite numerous studies, experts are divided on whether social media makes us happy in the long run.

However, there is consensus that social media is a place for demonstrating our happiness. The UN World Happiness report had ranked Finland as the happiest country for three years in a row. A recent research report named ‘#Happy: Constructing and Sharing Everyday Understandings of Happiness on Instagram’ investigated what amounts to happiness on Instagram for users from Finland. Researchers found that happiness on Instagram is associated with the seven dominant themes of social relationships, material possessions, free time, nature, physical appearance, pets, and success. The study was careful to describe this everyday happiness as one that is ‘constructed’ on Instagram. Social media posts allow us to tune into socially accepted notions of happiness. My posts about a rooster I meet during my morning runs always elicit a happy reaction.

Social representation theories suggest the inseparability of the individual from the social, so that people are passively mirroring shared group values. For example, amidst the distraught appeals for help during the second Covid-19 wave in India, fun posts were rarely seen. Earlier in the year, when British celebrities posted their destination photos, their followers back home who were still under lockdown, were not impressed.