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Happiness Participatory Media: Cultural Differences in Happiness on Instagram

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Advances in Industrial Design (AHFE 2020)

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 1202))

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Abstract

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 participatory media and the diverse social & cultural contexts.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Art and Art History, Santa Clara University, 500 El Camino Real, Santa Clara, CA, 95053, USA

    Qiuwen Li

  2. School of Design, South Dakota State University, 117 Grove Hall, Brookings, SD, 57007, USA

    Young Ae Kim

Authors
  1. Qiuwen Li
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  2. Young Ae Kim
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Qiuwen Li .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Architettura, Universitàdegli Studi G.d’Annunzio”, Pescara, Pescara, Italy

    Giuseppe Di Bucchianico

  2. Department of Industrial Design, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA

    Cliff Sungsoo Shin

  3. University of Notre Dame, Indiana, IN, USA

    Scott Shim

  4. System Design and Management, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan

    Shuichi Fukuda

  5. Faculty of Architecture, University of Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal

    Gianni Montagna

  6. Faculty of Architecture, University of Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal

    Cristina Carvalho

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Li, Q., Kim, Y.A. (2020). Happiness Participatory Media: Cultural Differences in Happiness on Instagram. In: Di Bucchianico, G., Shin, C., Shim, S., Fukuda, S., Montagna, G., Carvalho, C. (eds) Advances in Industrial Design. AHFE 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1202. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51194-4_52

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51194-4_52

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-51193-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-51194-4

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

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