cloud atlas & can social media make you happier? {currently reading}

I was approached by the originators of a new app, to test it out and presumably write about my experiences with it. This happens to bloggers, I guess... although it is my first.

This new app encourages users to take a photo of the exact moment they feel happy and save it for future reference. It also allows users to share what makes them happy with a group of people they have presumably never met.

I do not know why this set me off in a stream of expletives against such programs. It is pretty much what social media already does: allows people to share what they like with total strangers. I guess what bothers me about this particular app is that it claims to be therapy, that it can pin point the moment you are happiest and allow you to relive that moment over and over, through photography. Unfortunately happiness doesn't work like that and the app is basically another platform for product endorsement. It brings the whole idea of social media to a new insidious level, calling it therapy, or does it? Are we happier when we are on Facebook? Twitter? Are we happier as consumers?

And this offer brings to mind the novel I am currently reading, Cloud Atlas. A story, made up of many smaller stories, which predict the fall of our current society, a society that culminates in a completely consumer based world of values and laws. Each story is set in a different time and place  all connected by certain moments, dreams, and oddly, birth marks. I have not finished it yet, but it is an interesting read so far. Most difficult to follow are the dialects, some imagined, some real, that the author uses to set apart each time frame.

random shot of happiness