Jackson’s Death a Downer for Blogosphere
Technology’s great, isn’t it? The world has gotten so sophisticated that now it’s possible to measure happiness. On the web.
Check out the results of a survey by researchers Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth, who monitored a mass of blogs to gauge the feelings of the world wide web’s users. They found that a huge wave of sadness hit on June 25th, following news of the shocking Michael Jackson death. Not too surprising, given how much influence the King of Pop had on our culture.
From Reuters:
Is it possible to tell how happy we all are?Yes, according to U.S. scientists who have devised a way to measure the happiness of millions of bloggers — and found Michael Jackson’s death was one of the saddest days while the U.S. election was the happiest in four years.
Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth, a mathematician and computer scientist from the Advanced Computing Center at the University of Vermont, have created a “sensor” to mine 2.3 million blogs and gather sentences beginning with “I feel” or “I am feeling.” Each sentence is then given a happiness score from 1 to 9 depending on a point system allocated to 1,034 words. For example, “triumphant” averages 8.87 points, “paradise” 8.72, “pancakes” 6.08, and “suicide” 1.25.
They said this “hedonometer” showed that the U.S. election day last November was the happiest day in four years with a spike in the word “proud” while the day of the “King of Pop’s” death was one of the unhappiest.