digital humanities: media ecology and information

1. Digital Humanities - Bocconi 2016 - Luca De Biase
Happiness
“Research is clear: Money
doesn’t buy happiness”.
John Robbins

2. Why do we want to innovate?

3. Why do we want to innovate?
❖ to get rich
❖ to stay competitive in a changing world
❖ to make a better world

5. –Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, 1990
“Twenty-three hundred years ago Aristotle
concluded that, more than anything else, men and
women seek happiness”.

6. We now know that…:
❖ There is no correlation between consumption and
happiness
❖ There is no correlation between growth in GDP and
happiness
❖ There are goods that make us dependent and other
goods that make us happy (or unhappy)

7. http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_economics_of_happiness
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/16/daniel-kahneman-thinking-fast-and-
slow-tributes
http://www.economist.com/blogs/feastandfamine/2012/04/happiness?
zid=318&ah=ac379c09c1c3fb67e0e8fd1964d5247f
Easterlin paradox

10. Data show how high material standards
of living are not related to much happiness
“It is a remarkable paradox that, at the pinnacle
of human material and technical achievement
we find ourselves anxiety-ridden, prone to
depression, worried about how others see us,
unsure of our friendships, driven to consume
and with little or no community life. Lacking
the relaxed sociale contact and emotional
satisfaction we all need, we seek comfort
in over-eating, obsessive shopping and
spending, or become prey to excessive alcohol,
psychoactive medicines and illegal drugs”.
The book is based on thirty years’
research: it shows that unequal
societies make everybody unhappy

11. Too little choice is unrewarding
Too much choice make us feel unsafe
Consumption si not happiness
A test at Amazon showed that 24 choices
drove more traffic to the page with them
than 6 choices, but those made less sales

13. Great value, no price
❖ relational goods
❖ environmental goods
❖ cultural heritage

14. Is the info-sphere good for
happiness?

15. Is the info-sphere good for happiness?
❖ It generates more relations: of what kind?
❖ It makes us more informed: are we sure?
❖ It is fun: but what exactly is funny in here?

16. Television vs. Wikipedia
❖ Wikipedia was made in 100
million hours of human effort
(2010)
❖ Americans watch 200 billion
hours of tv every year
❖ Americans spend 100 million
hours every weekend just
watching commercials in tv

17. Television vs. Wikipedia
❖ Luigino Bruni and Luca Stanca, “Watching
alone”, paper in the Journal of Economic
Behavior and Organization (2010): television
viewing plays a key role in crowding-out
social activities with solitary ones
❖ Marco Gui and Luca Stanca, working paper
(2009) Television Viewing, Satisfaction and
Happiness: “television can play a significant
role in raising people’s materialism and
material aspirations, thus leading
individuals to underestimate the relative
importance of interpersonal relations for
their life satisfaction and, as consequence, to
over invest in income-producing activities
and under-invest in relational activities”

18. Remix vs. Consumption
❖ Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture,
How big media uses
technology and the law to lock
down culture and control
creativity
❖ piracy, copyright, public
domain, fair use…

19. Alone together
❖ Sherry Turkle, Insieme ma soli,
Perché ci aspettiamo sempre
più dalla tecnologia e sempre
meno dagli altri, Codice. (2011)
❖ Maybe it is a projection of
human feelings into the
machine?

20. Reclaiming Conversation
❖ Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming
Conversation, The power of
talk in a Digital Age, 2015
❖ Solitude, self-reflection
❖ Family, friendship, romance
❖ Education, work
❖ The public square

22. Public space can be designed for happiness
❖ Jan Gehl is making cities more
walkable
❖ he studies how people live,
where they go, how they use
public space
❖ an architect working with
anthropologists and data
scientists
❖ he remade Times Square, by
the way

23. To be happy in the info-sphere we
need to be actors and not audience

25. –Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, 1990
“Happiness is not something that happens. It is not
the result of good fortune or random chance. It is
not something that money can buy or power
command”.

26. –Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, 1990
“The optimal state is one in which there is order in
consciousness. This happens when psychic energy
- or attention - is invested in realistic goals, and
when skills match the opportunities for action”.

27. challenge
skill
boredom
anxiety
flow
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

28. –Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, 1990
“The last step: how people manage to join all
experience into a meaningful pattern”.

29. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow
Another way to see the flow

30. Narratives and happiness
❖ We feel in the flow if we live in a story that makes us
feel compelled and able to achieve our goals
❖ Narratives are (sort of) the story in which we live and
have an influence on our goals
❖ As we innovate in a way that is adopted we may
experience the flow

31. Service design, community design
❖ Ezio Manzini, Design, when
everybody designs. An
introduction to design for
social innovation. “We define
social innovations as new ideas
(products, service and models)
that simultaneously meet social
needs and create new social
relationships or collaborations”

32. To be happy we need meaning