Do blogs contain the recipe for happiness?

I have read that blog posts are a reflection of one’s happiness and what is presented in A Corpus-based Approach to Finding Happiness (PDF) seems inaccurate and flawed both in findings and their approach.

This study was conducted by Rada Mihalcea (Computer Science and Engineering, University of North Texas) and Hugo Liu (Media Arts and Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in order to determine the sources of happiness and sadness. By employing linguistic ethnography to break down LiveJournal blog posts to the annotated “moods” and then cross reference these with what those posts are about, they present a LiveJournal recipe to happiness based on sheer semantic analysis.

Here is the recipe for happiness according to blog posts:

Recipe for Happiness

Ingredients
- Something new
- Lots of food that you enjoy
- Your favorite drink
- An interesting social place

Directions
Go shop for something new – something cool, make sure that you love it. Then have lots of food, for dinner preferably, as the times of breakfast and lunch are to be avoided. Consider also including a new, hot taste, and one of your favorite drinks. Then go to an interesting place, it could be a movie, a concert, a party, or any other social place. Having fun, and optionally getting drunk, is also part of the recipe. Note that you should avoid any unnecessary actions, as they can occasionally trigger feelings of unhappiness. Ideally the recipe should be served on a Saturday, for maximum happiness effect. If all this happens on your birthday, even better.

Sounds like fun: eating, boozing, partying all around! Great! But what am I supposed to do for the other six days of the week? Clearly this cannot be considered a recipe for happiness. If you look at the age distribution in LiveJournal stats and interesting factor becomes apparent.

The individuals using LiveJournal are primarily American and primarily between the ages of mid-teens to mid-twenties. So now we are left with recipe for happiness for Americans in their party years, and in order to be happy they must party and allow hormones to rage.
But another thing confuses me about this study which I think should have been the greatest concern, and generally makes the study pointless. What about the things that are not revealed. The “moods” that are not posted and the words that are not said.

In their concluding remarks, Mihalcea and Liu make this assertion about the validity of the study:

While most of the previous evaluations of the happiness load of concepts were derived through explicit human annotations, the goal of this study was to find the happiness associated with words and facts as it results from the natural unconstrained expression of feelings found in diary-like blog entries. As pointed out earlier, this unconstrained and more private type of writing allows us to identify expressions of happiness that occur naturally,and which reflect private feelings of happiness. Private happiness may sometimes differ from the kind of public happiness typically expressed in social circles—the only kind capturable within experimental focus group settings, such as those used to produce the ANEW wordlist.

But who visits your LiveJournal? Your friends, and then more people. A blog is not a private, unconstrained expression of happy/sad wordlists, it is a selection and reinterpretation of oneself. What is not said makes up the bulk of what a blog could be, but is not because no one reveals everything in their blog. Especially those things that are most important, whether good or bad. Because the plain fact is: People can read it, and even teens know this fact. Pew Internet researchers found that older teens were found to use social networks online, and that the motivations for participation was split across genders:

For girls, social networking sites are primarily places to reinforce pre-existing friendships; for boys, the networks also provide opportunities for flirting and making new friends.

It follows then since participation is socially motivated, and therefore social constraints on expression would exist. Therefore these are not unconstrained utterances of true feelings, and cannot be treated as such. So at the end of the day we are left with: A recipe for happiness that teens and young adults want other teens and young adults to think they indulge in.

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