Happiness Participatory Media: Cultural Differences in Happiness on Instagram
ISBN TBA
DIO TBA
PUBLISHER. Springer
AUTHOR/S/. Qiuwen Li & Young Ae Kim
CATEGORIES. Emotional design.
KEYWORDS. Happiness, Instagram, Cultures, Participatory Media, Visualization, Lifestyle, Emotion, Social Media, Social Network, Social Comparison, Self-concept, Emotional Responding, Body image, Vanity Validation
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 influenced heavily on individuals’ perceptions of what they considered to be happy. In fact, physical appearance was by far an 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 oneself, but also opportunities to display perfect version of oneself with desired lifestyle. The project brought to light the development of participatory media and the diverse social & cultural contexts.
There are decades of innovations ahead. We’re at the very beginning, where it’s just at the stage where we can bring in consumers [but] there’s so much further to go from there.
- Brendan Iribe
Visualization
The 3D visualization environment with Virtual Reality
VR technology provides an engaging learning experience for users. It will allow users to access a big data set in an interactive manner. Happiness Participatory Media VR allows for self-guided exploration of the dataset. As a user enters the VR space, they will be exposed to space with hashtags on Instagram that represent individuals’ happiness, such as #beautiful, #relationship, #achievement and #travel. A user can get closer to each hashtag and choose a specific hashtag to access further information that involved with the chosen hashtag. Users can select any hashtags floating surrounding them, and as they choose a particular hashtag, a group of images that associated with a chosen hashtag from 4,000 images and mean scores of datasets will be displayed. The below image displays the VR environment and the interface after a user chose a specific keyword. The VR experience will provide multi-dimensional with most memorable data visualization experience to explore the difference and similarity of how people portray their happiness from different cultures.
VR Interface.
The 2D visualization platform with Augmented Reality
AR experience exposes users to learning and exploring the environment about what they find interesting. Creativity and curiosity would be fostered for both student and general public users. Happiness Participatory Media AR is the perfect way to get students’ imagination flying. Participants will have interaction with exhibited 30 images of the most representable image from 4,000 dataset through Artivive app, which provides moving images of each image that spark users’ creativity. Fig. 7 is a demonstration of how it works.
AR Interface.
Things to think about.
01.
Physical appearance was by far a more important factor for young adults’ happiness than relationship, achievement, or travel/experience. We have been focused on emotional visual signals and words and how they influence individuals’ perceptions, value shift, and communication method changes.
02.
The Happiness Participatory Media project will be a window to reach a broad public (non-specialist audience), allowing them to filter the image database by any combination of hashtags, individual hashtags, or any type of images of characteristics.
03.
All photo data of this research has constraints and affordance due to the standardized appearance, format and resolution of posted images (612 x 612 pixels) on Instagram, which are edited by its filters and photo editing apps.
Make it Accessible.
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