There’s a good deal of noise making the rounds this morning over a New York Times article concerning the tech sector and its supposed stability in the face of global economic turmoil.
But let’s stop for a moment and put the very explicit talk over money matters off to the side. Something else caught my eye today, and I’d like to share a few thoughts about it.
“It” is the latest summary of surveys taken of populations all across the world about their feelings of happiness. Yes, happiness. In conjunction with the World Economic Forum, held annually in Davos, Switzerland, a global poll has been taken - dubbed the Gallup International Voice of the People survey - in which some 61,600 individuals from over 16 nations partook to document the current disparities and differences in general satisfaction and joyfulness of our species.
Granted, the sampling is a relatively small (miniscule, if we’re honest) one. The world is populated by some 6.5 billion human beings. A five-figure pool from which to gauge happiness in different lands in which single cities can house tens of millions of persons is hardly guaranteed to give one thorough and precise results. But, as they say, we’ll deal with what we’ve been given.
Now, you might be wondering where I’m going with this. You might be curious as to how one might bridge this information with the subject of technology and the Web. A valid point to raise.
And, well, the answer I have for you is pretty simple: online social networking upsets people.
Funny, eh? Yeah, in some respects, such a conclusion is really very humorous. Perhaps too humorous. But if you were to take a fairly basic look at how I’ve arrived at the abovementioned premise, you might not think it too far off the mark.
We all know which nations of the world are well developed and which are still in the early and middle stages of their own industrial revolutions. Is it too far fetched to think that the complex frameworks that are Web-based social networks play at least a small role in the exhaustion of happiness in the developed world?
Of course, it’s a stretch to think online social networking is the cause of the global psychological depression currently sweeping the US and other developed powerhouses. It’s certainly not a direct culprit of widespread moroseness.
But, like all things we well-off folk engorge ourselves upon, online social network is a central part of the big puzzle that is our highly sophisticated lifestyle. The majority of people residing in places like India, China and Nigeria aren’t so privileged (yet) as to be given MySpace and Facebook connections on a scale proportional to the Western world. The majority of their respective populations operate via far more simple and elementary modes of communication. And so they don’t have many cumbersome distractions. No need to maintain ties with dozens (or even hundreds or thousands) of associates near and far. Just the basics of existence. And they’re fairly content in such circumstances.
That’s not to say they’re happy to remain apart from the developed economies of the globe. Humans by nature wish to advance. But there’s something to be said about keeping things as plain, uncomplicated, and uncluttered as possible.