Disturbing behaviour

Something that I have always noticed while browsing the web, social networking and while on chat clients. A large number of status updates are increasingly becoming negative - complains, sad, depressing etc.

I took this long to actually post this is because first time for a blog entry i actually did some research.  The first criteria towards making such a claim would be to have considerable hours of experience in the above mentioned media, which if you know me then I do not need to explain that I most definitely do. So onto my research. For a complete week I made notes of the status updates on Facebook and Gtalk and other chat clients. Considering the amount of time I spend online, data was easy to acquire. Then I simply divided the messages into negative and positive. Some messages were just so insipid, well there was no point in even categorizing them ;). My suspicions were indeed correct. The number of negative messages was definitely larger (62%/38% to be precise). The negative messages were more popularly received on facebook - they had more reactions and more comments on an average. Somehow it felt disturbing. As if being pathetic, sad, depressing or complaining is the new social fashion on the web.

To say I was surprised was an understatement. I mean people always complain and be negative in real life from time to time. But why take special time out to even type it out. Why give that emotion so much importance. I decided to dig deeper. A friend of mine sent over a link www.tedmosbyisajerk.com and through that I also found a similar page that said tedmosbeyisnotajerk. Guess who had more hits. Yup. you are right the former. It had almost 50 times as many hits. I found similar websites that liked and disliked elements of popular culture and every time the negative aspect was more popular. This only meant 2 things for me. Either people dislike more things in the world than like them or they are going out of their way to emphasize their dislike and not doing the same for things they like. I mean if you dislike something you do and that is it. Why waste extra time to go ahead and register you opinion. Would you  not rather concentrate of talking about and finding things you like. Wouldn't that be a more prudent way to spend time. The fan pages on facebook told me a similar story. 'I like/love XYZ' was always less favored then 'I hate/dislike XYZ'. Is this just a geeky observation?? Or does the observation hold some merit?? Share your thoughts.

And yes before you dismiss this as geeky ramblings I would like you to check out this TED link. Someone doing something similar but on a much larger scale was considered good enough to share their idea with the world. If you do not know what TED is, I can excuse it if you are not an engineer otherwise...we seriously need to reconsider our relationship :)


http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_harris_tells_the_web_s_secret_stories.html