William Davies

You are currently browsing articles tagged William Davies.

“They Have Ways Of Making You Happy”

July 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

My opinion may be influenced by living in NYC and knowing lots of media workers, but I believe most people are fucking miserable. And the majority never change, except to get worse. So while the implications of “mood surveillance” by corporations and governments are troubling, I don’t know that unhappiness is a problem that can be manipulated or weeded out.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be efforts to do so, though. Philip Matthews of Stuff.co.nz speaks to sociologist William Davies, author of The Happiness Industry, about the past, present and future of measuring and modifying our moods. An excerpt:

Davies asks, what does a happiness or well-being industry exist for, and who benefits from it? At times, it can resemble science-fiction or a culture of benign-seeming surveillance.

There is the wearable technology that could let managers see how stressed employees are, or how active, which has sinister potential. Could managers identify the less active or sociable sector of their workforce and find ways to remove them? They could come to similar conclusions by analysing keywords in emails and social media messages, and picking up patterns in metadata.

“While I give it a slightly sinister spin, there are people out there who think this is the future of business,” Davies says.

Measuring and then modifying the public mood could turn out to be relatively easy. There is the example of a literature festival in the UK that filmed the smiles of attendees, which were analysed by software and rated. It was described by as “the future of evaluation”.

There was the infamous Facebook experiment, in which the news feeds of nearly 700,000 users were manipulated for a week to test theories about “emotional contagion”. Some users saw more good news than usual and some saw more bad news, and Facebook found that the input had a small effect on the output. In other words, those whose feeds had been negative posted more negative comments themselves.

They have ways of making you happy. In the UK, “the science of emotion has been put to work as part of an austerity agenda that withdraws benefits from vulnerable populations”, Davies says.

It almost sounds like a perversion of motivational thinking.•

Tags: ,

“There Has Been A Surge Of Interest In Happiness And Positive Emotion”

May 18, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Corporations have always sold “happiness,” realizing psychology was key to the bottom line, but they did so with some guesswork involved, hoping that small focus groups were accurate, wishing that you would look at that advertisement in that magazine. They approximated as they preyed upon vanities and weaknesses.

Once the Internet made it possible to quantify eyeballs, there was a shift toward real-time engagement of what was going on inside of minds. Apps are just a further extension of that type of measurement. Corporations don’t want to estimate anymore–they want to know. 

In Vice, Rose Bretécher interviews William Davies about The Happiness Industry, his new book about the marketing of just about every moment of our lives. An excerpt:

Vice:

What techniques and technologies does the happiness industry use to monitor our emotions?

William Davies:

There are countless new apps and gadgets—way too many to name. To give a couple of examples, there’s Affectiva, which uses a webcam to track consumers’ smiles, and Beyond Verbal, which can analyze your tone of voice on the phone. Just this week I heard that IBM are working with a startup on a tool which analyzes your text messages in order to recommend you a therapist.

Then you’ve got wristbands like Jawbones and Fitbits, which seem to suggest that there’s a scientific answer to how to live: “If you start doing this, you’ll feel better.” And I think that’s very problematic, because there are complex reasons why people behave as they do—some people aren’t simply able to just change what they do in response to data. Sometimes you’ll just go and eat a McDonald’s because you’re feeling lonely. These gadgets claim to be completely evidence-based and have no philosophy in them, and I think that’s slightly disingenuous. Clearly there’s something missing in this data-led view of life—it doesn’t touch upon the transcendent, life-changing, life-affirming forms of happiness that really don’t lend themselves to science.

Vice:

And why is data about our happiness valuable to big business and governments?

William Davies:

Businesses have been trying to predict and influence how people will behave for over a hundred years now. But in the last 20 years there has been a surge of interest in happiness and positive emotion because there’s evidence that happiness in the workplace contributes to productivity, and because stress leads to absence from work. And there’s also growing awareness in the world of marketing—which has been supported by neuroscience since the 1990s—that the best way for brands to develop consumer loyalty is to illicit a positive emotional reaction from consumers.•

Tags: ,