THE APPINESS PROJECT

THE 'APPINESS PROJECT

The internet has been hailed as a revolutionary tool for bringing people together, sharing knowledge and engaging audiences. However, there have also been claims the Internet has become addictive, increased social isolation and helped to spread hate. Our objective was to find out if connected technologies are overall, beneficial or detrimental to our well-being. Our research – in France, Germany and the UK – combined a traditional online survey, which matched the happiness question wording of official well-being surveys with passive tracking data (i.e. web and app behaviour tracked across the participants’ phones, tablets and PC/laptops). It was vital here to obtain real behavioural data because when it comes to Internet usage, declarative data may be biased or inaccurate (even if you are ready to face the truth, it is difficult to estimate the time you spend online each day, on every website, every app etc.).