According to a strain of trend piece popular in certain circles these days, the Web is some kind of social parasite, eating our decency and confidence and good humor away. It’s filled us with FOMO; it’s made us fake; it’s torpedoed love and intimacy.It’s also, per a new paper, made us measurably happier as a society.The paper, titled “Life Satisfaction in the Internet Age” and forthcoming in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, is the first to study the long-term, at-scale impact of the Internet on personal satisfaction. The researchers — both of whom are based out of Israeli universities — analyzed almost a decade of data from Israel’s Annual Social Surveys, encompassing responses from more than 70,000 people.
www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/08/25/blessed-the-internet-actually-makes-us-happier-science-says/