Hacking Happiness

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Book: Read Hacking Happiness for Free Online
Authors: John Havens
this book:
The Internet
The Outernet
How we relate to one another as people
    The Internet you know from using it on your computer. You’re probably also used to it living on your phone, and the concept of your car having Internet access is becoming familiar. But as a rule many think the Web is something that turns on and off with our computers, as we’ve become so used to it being in our lives. Unless Wi-Fi is down, we turn to the Internet and it’s there.
    The Outernet refers to the combination of technologies affecting you away from your computer. Your mobile phone containsmany of these—GPS, an accelerometer, a microphone. But there are also technologies referred to as the “Internet of Things,” which include sensors and devices in cars, buildings, and the world around us that we typically don’t see.
    You’re aware of how your behavior is tracked on the Internet. Cookies are placed when you visit websites, leaving a digital trail that reflects who you are. In the Outernet, tracking happens the same way, but you’re less aware of its effects, many times because of its mundane nature. If you live in the Northeast, you likely have an E-ZPass, a device you place in your car to speed toll collection. Instead of slowing down to pay an attendant, you choose the lane that automatically deducts the highway fee from your bank account. You don’t think, “I’ve just left a point of data reflecting my identity” when you do so, but that’s the case. The time and location of when you were driving directly tied to your finances is registered in an instant. A little piece of you is recorded for the rest of time.
    The more the world is connected around us, the more snapshots of our behavior are recorded to form a picture of our digital, or virtual, identities. And soon technologies like augmented reality, in the form of Google Glass or dozens of other wearable devices, will allow us to see other people’s data. How this will happen culturally is less clear than how the technology will work, but suffice it to say your actions in the Connected World will start to more directly affect your reputation and your well-being.
    Well-being in the Connected World has three components:
Subjective well-being—how you perceive your happiness and actions
Avataristic well-being—how you project your happiness and actions
Quantified well-being—how devices record your actions reflecting your happiness
    These are critical distinctions that relate to other central themes in the book.
    Taking a subjective measure of your happiness means I ask you to rate your perception of your mood in the moment. Your response, indicated typically as a number on a scale, 1 reflects your truth. You may inflate your score due to survey bias, but when asked under the right circumstances, measures of subjective well-being provide a powerfully transparent way of assessing people’s perception of the world around them.
    Avataristic well-being refers to how we broadcast ourselves, largely in the realm of social media. As an avatar is a manifestation of your character or alter ego in digital format, you can nurture or ignore it as you see fit. But the more engaging content you offer to online followers, the higher search rankings you’re likely to get. When people pass on what you say or share, your online influence increases as a reflection of activity associated with your identity.
    This is the realm of Klout and dozens of other similar companies working to measure online influence. These tools provide the benefit of breaking through the massive amounts of online content to identify people focused on particular subjects who have a significant following. “Significant” refers to the number or scale of people following an influencer or the demographic makeup of those followers.
    Measuring influence in this way is of particular interest for brands. Identifying potential evangelists for products and services can be as simple as approaching top influencers in a

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