Via The Atlantic‘s Alexis Madrigal, we’re shocked to discover that, according to Twitter, Spokane is happier than Seattle. How is it possible? They don’t have a Space Needle or a giant waterfront Ferris wheel or Canon. (They do have an Interstate Fair Rodeo, though.)
The happiness mapping was done by a group from the Vermont Complex Systems Center, but it’s in part a Seattle story, because it relied upon work done by Amazon’s online legion of Mechanical Turks. The Turks previously had scored individual words for their “happiness” content, on a spectrum:
For example, ‘rainbow’ is one of the happiest words in the list with a score of havg = 8:1, while ‘earthquake’ is one of the saddest, with havg = 1:9.
The Vermont study then scored more than 10 million geo-tagged tweets according to that database. The goal was to “examine how individual word usage correlates with happiness and various social and economic factors.” As we know from Depeche Mode, everything counts in large amounts — so too with tweets. Yes, someone might hate rainbows with a passion, but in aggregate, a bunch of rainbows would indicate “Ahh!”
Like Jesus, the study spits the lukewarm words from its mouth, because it would be too difficult to assess “neutral” words (rated between 4 and 6) in this way. “Coffee,” by the way, has a happiness rating of 7.18, just behind “chocolate” at 7.86.
While Hawaii (no surprise there) rings in at No. 1 in happy-good-time feelings, Washington manages a respectable ninth place. Or it would be respectable if Idaho hadn’t gotten seventh. But in the city rankings, Spokane is eleventh, while Seattle is sixty-fifth! (First-place city Napa, Madrigal notes, is where a lot of wine-sozzled tweets take flight, but let’s not forget that Santa Cruz, at fifth place, is populated largely by stoned surfers.)
Interestingly, the fault may lie not in our cityscape, but in our apps. The researchers found that the more tweets there were per capita, the less happy the tweets were: “This suggests that cities with high technology adoption rates (as most geotagged tweets come from devices like smartphones) are in fact less happy than their less technological counterparts.” Bucolic Spokane wins again.
I have considered this invalid considering “bitch” far out ranks “bitches” and that’s just mathematically impossible.
Wait a second. We’re being judged on how often we tweet “lol” and “beach”? Our high IQ’s likely rule out the former and our poor weather the latter. Ok, so we swear a lot and apparently love less. That’s bad. But it’s better than being a bunch of lol tweeters.
Noticing our second weakness “me”, make that: At least we’re not a bunch of narcissistic “lol” tweeters.
lol is terrible, yes. AND it’s also true they didn’t screen out tourists, it’s just tweets from a general area, so far as I can tell.