Hacking Happiness by John Havens Read Free Book Online

exclusionary for those who don’t have resources relevant for improvement.
    Kids are a part of the growing group of people without adequate resources to deal with identity issues in our modern digital environment. Along these lines, I interviewed Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, best known for his theory of multipleintelligences and education reform. His book The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World provides deep insight into how kids relate to software applications and how apps can increase creativity and a strong sense of identity when viewed beyond the often limiting ways they’re designed to be used. I asked Gardner how apps were shaping identity for kids in regard to influence issues.
Social media like Facebook encourage individuals to “package themselves” so that they look as good, as perfect as possible. Not only does that inhibit exploration of identity, but it also makes youths feel inadequate, because they cannot live up to the apparently perfect lives of their peers. Of course, there were “role models” in earlier times, including ones taken from TV, but they were far more remote; one could not interact with them, and they did not change several times a week! 5
    The stress involving upkeep of one’s avataristic well-being is affecting us at an early age. Kids aren’t allowed the time needed to understand identity issues, let alone know how to fabricate a perfect persona online.
    Quantified well-being in the Connected World refers to how data is collected about a person that can be uniformly measured. For instance, the iPhone app Cardiio measures your heart rate as indicated by a change of color in your face via reflected light not visible to the human eye. The data is aggregated to a dashboard allowing you to share it or compare it with others. One can question the accuracy of the tool, but if it matches up to other modes of collection you can log your heart rate as an objective, quantified measure.
    What becomes fascinating regarding your well-being and digital identity is when you start to compare more than one quantifieddata stream. Where it would be possible to create a longitudinal study, or repeated observations over a long period of time about the same variables in an experiment, you could start to see patterns that could lead to insights when comparing relevant data points.
    A simple experiment would be running along the same route every day for a year and taking your heart rate at the same locations along the way. If you utilized your GPS data to track your location, time, and date stamps, patterns would emerge demonstrating which parts of the track spiked your heart rate. You’d see that the point in time at which you ran also affected your results (after a meal, late in the day). If you incorporated weather data in the mix, you might see how atmospheric pressure affected your runs and health.
    I conducted a highly nonscientific test to show how emotions, or quantified happiness, may someday end up in the mix of measuring well-being. I used the Cardiio app and took my resting heart rate (see below) and got a reading of seventy-eight. Then, without moving from my chair, I watched Kmart’s Ship My Pants 6 commercial on YouTube. (It’s really funny; it involves multiple people saying “I shipped my pants” so you think they’re saying something else.) My heart rate after watching the video once was seventy. By the third viewing (I was guffawing at this point), my reading was fifty-two.
    Does this prove I’ve quantified happiness in some way? Not at all, but it’s a start. Keep in mind I only used one data point—my heart rate—to measure my reaction to the video. If I used an app like Emotion Sense, I would also get time-stamped data relating to my mood and the tone of my voice. If I utilized a service like WeMo with home automation technology and utilized