Happiness Participatory Media: Cultural Differences in Happiness on Instagram

摘要

The Happiness Participatory Media analyzes Instagram data for visual cues with emotional expression (happiness), hashtags (words), gender, age, and locations, in order to get a clearer picture of how people portray their happiness from different cultures. This research looked at the actual patterns of the dataset to see how it is different and/or similar to the generalized idea of happiness today. In our previous research, we were curious about how to approach theoretically social media images in general and to understand one's emotional expression through social media, in particular, Instagram. We incorporated an ensemble of computational methods from machine learning, image processing, and information design to extract useful psychological indicators from photographic data. Hence, we discovered that the daily communication method has been changed drastically, which heavily influenced individuals' perceptions of what they considered to be happy. In fact, physical appearance was by far a more important factor for young adults' happiness than relationships, achievement, or travel/experience (Li & Kim 2019). Happiness Participatory Media centralized disparate archives of happiness expressions through Instagram from 3 countries in the international locations Seoul, Korea (four seasons), Naha Japan (one season), and New York (four seasons) and Los Angeles (one season) in the United States using a mix of theoretical, artistic, and quantitative methods. This rich media visualization will be assembled with thousands of photos to reveal interesting patterns and allow participants to navigate the whole set of 4,000 photos (1000 images of each location) with hashtags of #beautiful, #relationship, #achievement, and #travel. In addition, we will address social media as not only a function of emotional expression through images of oneself, but also opportunities to display a perfect version of oneself with a desired lifestyle. The project brought to light the development of part