Tag Archives: apps

hAPPiness Tracking and Promoting

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In Flow and GPS 4 The Soul are some interesting apps that has the same purposes. It’s purpose to track happiness and promote it. How does it work(?), one might ask. Does it work(?) or is it all a scam for your money(?) At first I was wasn’t really surprise about all these tracking and promoting happiness apps. There are millions of apps being developed right now as I am writing this blog.  I was however, annoyed when I first downloaded the apps. It’s basically ask me what I am doing and How I am feeling doing it. This is what most of the apps asked me to do. However I came across Happify. It is unlike the other apps. It better and much fun then just asking me questions.

In happily, It looks more developed and more efficient due to it having activities for us to do. One of the game, have us clicking on hot air balloons with positive words to make them go up and if we clicked a negative word, the balloon would go down. It’s quite a learning tool too. I played the game and as the level goes up, the words became outside my vocabulary. I learnt a feel positive words and also some negative words. Happify is free for it user, however for full access, a 15 dollars fee each month is required.

This tracking and promoting happiness reminds me about the first article we read for this class. I remember myself disagree with the fact that the government is trying to track people happiness , but agree that they trying to promote happiness however by picking sides. Since these apps are self-help apps that a user are willing to download it, I am fine with them tracking ones happiness.

 

 

In the app store: Happiness

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In the tech world today, we can basically do anything. We have social networks. Just to name two we have Facebook and Twitter. We have apps on our phone. In fact more than one million of apps are being develop a day. This is why there isn’t no surprise, when happiness is also a purpose for an app. We have apps for everything now, for shopping, games, workouts, etc. So happiness got to be part of such a huge library of apps. However, are people just making money of it or just want society to be happy(?)

The app “Happier” is what the developers called a “course”. To me it’s a marketing skill. Since I happen to read how the course works, it’s seem kind of like youtube. It is just basically watching videos each day. The video often contains a lesson. However, to actually be in the “Course, one’s must pay $4.99. It’s a costly app, with such normal content to me. The app giving a free trail is just to lure us into to paying for it.

To actually gain more information, I downloaded the app to see what the fuss is all about. I just don’t see, but want to see how it actually works or how they claimed it works. After signing up, it tells me to pick an area of focus. I can see how people could actually like that because they want to focus on their own problems rather then focusing on a broader subject. I picked “mind” as my focus to see what happens.  The it gave me a list of courses. There are courses for meditation, stress, sleep, yoga, etc. It actually provides free courses. I picked the sleep Deep & Dream sweet course. It provides a seven day relaxing bedtime mediation to help my sleep. Each course has a host, and my course host gave me my intro lesson. After a few glimpse I went to my first lesson. i was led to watching my first video What a waste of my three minutes. It was boring to me making kind of unhappy. How ironic that I feel this way.  However the video did taught me something. If I want a great sleep, everyday before I sleep I should have a ritual. It could be anything. It could be drinking a cup of milk or water or turn off all electronics, etc. In another app called “Happify” it’s basically the same concept of “Happier”, but it does includes actitives and games that are “science-based happiness”. See what they did(?) To me it’s another marketing technique.

In the Hedonometer, it shows a graph of twitter in it’s happiness times. It has concluded the many tweeted happily during the holidays while the someone death decreased the happier tweets. Social network is like a primarily source track happiness even daily.

In conclusion, when it comes to tech, many people use the word happiness lure people into taking some cash out of their pockets. It’s just many want to be happy, stress-free, etc. People will actually willing to pay for this emotion. It also be tracked from social networks from all parts of the world. Happiness in some ways became the purpose of everything today.