Abstract
Spending a large number of hours on the Internet has positive and negative effects on subjective well-being. Social network users tend to compare their income to those with whom they interact, leading to less satisfaction with their own income. People with a strong inclination to be “liked” on Facebook are less satisfied with the life they lead and feel lonelier. Hours spent on online social networks are negatively correlated with happiness. The overall consequences on subjective well-being of these far-reaching digital developments are yet unknown.
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Helbing, Dirk. 2015. Thinking Ahead. Essays on Big Data, Digital Revolution, and Participatory Market Society. Cham: Springer.
Pasquale, Frank. 2016. The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
A positive relationship between an aggregate index of digitization and life satisfaction has been suggested by:
Katz, Raul L., and Pantelis Koutroumpis. 2013. Measuring Digitization: A Growth and Welfare Multiplier. Technovation 33 (10): 314–319.
Negative effects have been found by:
Sabatini, Fabio, and Francesco Sarracino. 2017. Online Networks and Subjective Well-Being. Kyklos 70 (3): 456–480.
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Frey, B.S. (2018). Happiness in the Digital World. In: Economics of Happiness. SpringerBriefs in Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75807-7_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75807-7_14
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