The Happiness Industry Read online

  The positive and negative feelings that emerge from every house, between houses, from every factory, and from national and political groups in the community can be explored by means of sociometric analysis. A new order by means of sociometric methods is herewith recommended.16

  What was this ‘sociometric’ analysis he referred to? And how would it help? Though still undeveloped as a mathematical science, let alone a computational one, ‘sociometry’, as Moreno imagined it, laid the groundwork for what later became social network analysis and, consequently, social media. But before this could be developed as a scientific possibility, another part of Moreno’s self-fantasy would have to be mobilized.

  He claimed that he was always destined to live in the United States. Advancing the myth of his fatherless, nationless origins, he declared, ‘I was born a citizen of the world, a sailor moving from sea to sea, from country to country, destined to land one day in New York harbor.’ In 1922, he reported a dream in which he was standing on Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, in possession of a new device for recording and playing sound. Not content with giving birth to a whole new branch of psychology, the dream indicated to Moreno that he was also destined to invent the record player. With his collaborator, Franz Lornitzo, he set to work on such a device over the course of 1924, filing a patent on it in Vienna, resulting in an invitation to Ohio to develop the technology with the General Phonograph Manufacturing Company.

  Moreno would be ultimately frustrated by the lack of recognition he would receive for this creation, characteristically refusing to acknowledge that there were multiple similar projects going on simultaneously. Nor were his hosts in Ohio as fawning towards this unlikely inventor as he had assumed they would be. But the invitation to Ohio did nevertheless allow him to realize his vision of himself as a self-parented, nationless American. Besides, New York City – the place that had occupied his dreams and fantasies for the previous decade – pointed towards a new model of society that seemed to chime with Moreno’s assumption about sovereign selves existing in social groups of their own making.

  As Moreno’s curt remark to Freud indicated, his problem with psychoanalysis was that it studied individuals as separate from society, without the constraints offered by existing relationships. But what was the alternative? The danger was that the extreme individualism of Freudianism could flip directly into the equally extreme collectivism of Marxism, or else the form of statistical sociology pioneered by Émile Durkheim. In Moreno’s eyes, this left Europeans with a bipolar choice, between the enforced collectivity of the socialist state and the unruly egoism of the unconscious self. New York, however, suggested that some sort of third way was possible. Here was a city where individuals lived on top of one another, cooperating in various subtle ways, but without having their individual freedom trammelled in the process. America, Moreno reasoned, was a nation built upon self-forming groups.

  The mathematics of friendship

  It was in New York that he got his first opportunities to develop the research techniques he had already conceived of as ‘sociometry’. He was judicious enough to abandon the talk of individuals as their own personal gods, but other than that, Moreno was intent on building on the insights he’d acquired in the wartime refugee camps and the psychological theories in The Words of the Father. He described the project of sociometry as follows:

  It is important to know whether the construction of a community is possible in which each of its members is to the utmost degree a free agent in the making of the collectives of which he is a part and in which the different groups of which it consists are so organized and fitted to each other that an enduring and harmonious commonwealth is the result.17

  Relationships are there to serve the individual. Spontaneity and creativity derive wholly from each of us individually, but our capacity to release them depends on being in the right social circumstances. The task of sociometry was to place the study of an individual’s social relationships on a scientific footing, which would ultimately incorporate mathematics.

  Moreno had toyed with various ways of doing this while still in Vienna. He had a hunch that visual diagrams might be the best way of representing complex webs of interaction. Having presented some of these ideas at a psychiatry conference in 1931, he was invited to try out this proposed mode of study on the inmates of Sing Sing prison, New York. Moreno devised a questionnaire to assess the prisoners according to thirty simple attributes, such as age, nationality, ethnicity and so on. In the age of the survey, there was nothing unusual about that; what he did next was ground-breaking.

  Rather than analyse this data in terms of averages, aggregates and probabilities (as the market researchers and pollsters were beginning to do at this time), he compared each and every prisoner to each and every other prisoner, with a view to assessing how well matched they were to one another, individually. Here was the birth of a new form of sociology aimed at capturing the value of one-to-one relationships, in terms of how far they benefited the individuals who were party to them. He wasn’t interested in what was normal or typical in general. What he wanted to know was how individuals were influenced by those people they happened to know.

  Prior to the invention of computers, the mathematics of this research method was fearsome. To study every relationship in a group of four people involves looking at a maximum of six links. Increase the group size to ten people, and you’re looking at forty-five possible connections. Increase it again to thirty people, and the potential number of relationships increases to 465. And so on. It was slow and laborious work. But men could not retain the status of gods in their own social worlds unless their individual autonomy was respected by the social research method.

  The following year, Moreno got another chance to implement sociometry, at the New York Training School for Girls in Hudson. This time, he focused more explicitly on individual attitudes towards each other, asking them with whom they would like to share a room and whom they already knew. This study witnessed Moreno produce visual sociometric maps of the results for the first time, marking out webs of common links between girls in the school in hand-drawn red lines, later to be published in his 1934 work Who Shall Survive? The social world had just become visible in an entirely new way. This, arguably, was the means of visualization which would dominate twenty-first-century understandings of the ‘social’.

  The vision of social life that fuelled sociometry was undoubtedly a far more individualistic one than that which had inspired sociology up until then. Collective entities emerged only thanks to the spontaneous power of individual egos. They could just as easily be dispensed with again. As far as Moreno was concerned, American culture was founded on specifically this freedom to enter and exit groups. But creating a social science which recognized this individual freedom was far from straight-forward. Two problems in particular presented themselves.

  Firstly, the rich, binding, comforting and sometimes suffocating nature of social life gets eliminated from view. The sorts of data that can be included in a sociometric study are necessarily very simplified. Just as social media sites offer users strict limits to how they can define themselves romantically (‘single’, ‘in a relationship’ or ‘it’s complicated’) or in relation to each other (‘friend’ or ‘unfriend’, ‘follow’ or ‘unfollow’), Moreno’s sociometry would only succeed if nuance were stripped out. The price to be paid for exiting the restricted limits of the Freudian office was that the depths of the human psyche started to disappear from view. To carve a path between a science of society and a science of the isolated individual, sociometry necessarily had to simplify both substantially. Of course such simplification can also be attractive, as Nicholas Christakis’s visualization demo in London that day testified. To act scientifically upon the social world, elites need to have nuance and culture removed.

  Secondly, what to do with the reams of data that resulted from viewing society as a web of interpersonal relations? How to cope with it all or make sense of it? Moreno had no answer to this. The fact
that social network analysis would not really take off until the 1960s wasn’t for want of an adequate underlying theory, but for want of sufficient power to crunch the numbers. As we have seen, the mathematical challenge that Moreno laid down for the social sciences was onerous. Social network analysis developed slowly in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s, impeded by the problem of processing complex bodies of data. Algorithms were developed which could discover patterns in social data, but universities lacked the computing power to automate them.

  It wasn’t until the 1970s that a succession of software packages was developed for purposes of social network analysis.18 Of course these still required academic researchers to go and collect data to feed into the computers. This was still a laborious way of analysing the social world, which – compared with statistics – had little hold over the public imagination. All it took was for a broad mass of individuals to become regular users of networked computers, and Moreno’s methodology could become a dominant way of understanding the meaning of the term ‘social’. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, this was the very situation which had arisen, the opportunities of which were seized by the ‘Web 2.0’ companies which emerged from 2003 onwards. The sociometric studies which Moreno had conducted through interviews with a few dozen people, producing hand-drawn diagrams, could now be carried out in Facebook HQ at the flick of a switch, with a billion participants.

  But methods of social analysis are never as politically innocent as they appear. While social network analysis purports to be a simple, stripped-down mathematical study of the ties that bind us, it’s worth reflecting on the philosophy that inspired its founder. As far as Moreno was concerned, other people are there to prop up and please individual egos. A friendship is valuable to the extent that it makes me feel better. Once the study of social life is converted into a branch of mathematical psychology, then this produces some worrying effects on how people start to relate to each other. The narcissism of the small boy playing God surrounded by his angels has become another model for how pleasure is now manufactured and measured.

  Addicted to contact

  The main charge that has been levelled against the DSM, since the introduction of the DSM-III in 1980, is that it converts everyday forms of sadness and personality quirks into illnesses. This has been particularly pronounced in the identification of ever more forms of addiction. Until the early 1970s, addiction would only have been understood as referring to syndromes which affect the metabolism, such as alcoholism, and even then its social and cultural dimensions would have been recognized. In the era of the DSM-III and since, new addictions have been identified and diagnosed in relation to all manner of hedonistic practices and experiences, from gambling to shopping to sex. Inevitably, the new diagnostic categories lend support to biological explanations that the behaviours are hard-wired into certain brains or genes.

  The DSM-V, which was launched in early 2013, added a further item to the menu of dysfunctional compulsions: internet addiction. Many doctors and psychiatrists are confident that this latest syndrome qualifies as a true addiction, no less than addiction to drugs. Sufferers show all the hallmarks of addictive behaviour. Internet use can overwhelm their ability to maintain relationships or hold down a career. When internet addicts are cut off from the web as a form of ‘cold turkey’, they can develop physiological withdrawal symptoms. They lie to those they are close to in an effort to get their fix. Neuroscience shows that the pleasures associated with internet use can be chemically identical to those associated with cocaine use or other addictive pastimes.

  If we can look beyond the neurochemistry for a moment, it is worth asking one simple question: what is the internet addict addicted to exactly? One of the psychiatrists who has explored this phenomenon most closely is Richard Graham, based at London’s Tavistock Clinic. And the conclusion he has reached brings us squarely to the pathologies of the new concept of the ‘social’.

  In 2005, Graham was studying the ways in which video games impacted on the behaviour and attitudes of young people. It was thanks to this expertise that a teenage boy was referred to him with symptoms of depression, who was also a compulsive player of computer games, in particular a game called Halo. The boy played for four or five hours a day, obsessively trying to reach the next level of the game, cutting him off from his friends and family in the process. His parents were concerned about the amount of time he spent in his room. And yet the gaming in itself didn’t strike Graham as a particular cause for concern.

  But in 2006, the boy’s situation became rapidly more serious. He switched to playing World of Warcraft, which coincided with a marked increase in his amount of gaming time, to as much as fifteen hours every day. His parents became increasingly concerned but felt powerless to do anything. The situation continued like this for another three years. Reaching breaking point on Mothering Sunday, 2009, they turned off his modem. The boy immediately became violent, to the point where they had to call the police. His relationship to the video game had become beyond his, or anyone else’s, control.

  The key difference between the two games is that World of Warcraft involves playing against other gamers in real time. It involves respect and recognition from real people. Unlike Halo, which the boy had played obsessively but not addictively, World of Warcraft is a social experience. Even while the boy remained alone in his room staring at moving graphics on a monitor, the knowledge that other players were present offered a form of psychological ‘hit’ that wasn’t available from regular video games. Clearly, the boy was not simply addicted to technology but to a particular type of egocentric relationship which networked computers are particularly adept at providing.

  Graham has since become a noted authority on the topic of social media addiction, especially among young people. What he noticed, in the case of the World of Warcraft addict, was simply an extreme case of an affliction that has become widespread in the age of Facebook and smartphones. Social media addiction may be classed as a particular subset of internet addiction, as far as the DSM is concerned, but it is the social logic of it which is so psychologically powerful. Not unlike the gamer, people who cannot put down their smartphones are not engaging with images or gadgetry for the sake of it: they are desperately seeking some form of human interaction, but of a kind that does nothing to limit their personal, private autonomy. In America today, it is estimated that 38 per cent of adults may suffer from some form of social media addiction.19 Some psychiatrists have suggested that Facebook and Twitter are even more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol.20

  The ubiquity of digital media has become a lightning rod for media hysteria. The internet or Facebook can be blamed for the fact that young people are increasingly narcissistic, unable to make commitments to one another, cannot concentrate on anything which isn’t ‘interactive’. This typically includes some latest discovery about what ‘screen time’ is doing to our brains. There is indeed some evidence to suggest that individuals who use social media compulsively are more egocentric, prone to ‘exhibitionism’ and ‘grandiose behaviour’.21 But rather than treat the technology as some virus that has corrupted people psychologically and neurologically, it is worth standing back and reflecting on the broader cultural logic at work here.

  What we witness, in the case of a World of Warcraft addict, a social media addict or, for that matter, a sex addict, is only the more pathological element of a society that cannot conceive of relationships except in terms of the psychological pleasures that they produce. The person whose fingers twitch to check their Facebook page, when they’re supposed to be listening to their friend over a meal, is the heir to Jacob Moreno’s ethical philosophy, in which other people are only there to please, satisfy and affirm an individual ego from one moment to the next. This inevitably leads to vicious circles: once a social bond is stripped down to this impoverished psychological level, it becomes harder and harder to find the satisfaction that one desperately wants. Viewing other people as instruments for one’s own pleasure
represents a denial of core ethical and emotional truths of friendship, love and generosity.

  One grave shortcoming of this egocentric idea of the ‘social’ is that none (or at least, vanishingly few) of us can ever constantly be the centre of attention, receiving praise. Nobody can be God the whole time; mostly they must be the angels who surround the deity. And so it also proves with Facebook. As an endless stream of grandiose spectacles, Facebook has been shown, on balance, to make individuals feel worse about themselves and their own lives.22 The mathematics of networks means that most people will have fewer friends than average, while a small number of people will have far more than average.23 The tonic to this sense of inferiority is to make grandiose spectacles of one’s own, to seek the gaze of the other, thereby reinforcing a collective vicious circle. As the positive psychologists are keen to stress, this inability to listen or empathize is a significant contributor to depression.

  A key category in social network analysis is ‘centrality’. It refers to the extent to which a given ‘node’ (such as a person, but it could potentially be an organization) is integral to its own social world. In Moreno’s terms, one might even say that it offers a measure of social ‘godliness’. Again, where a network is larger than a few dozen people, this is something that is almost impossible to calculate without computing power. But throw in twenty-first-century processing power and the ubiquitous digitization of social networks, and the logic of centrality comes to divide and rule. It governs the Twitter user, who keeps anxious check on her ratio of followers to those followed. It underpins the depression and loneliness of the person who feels marginalized from a social world that he can observe but not participate in. The fetish of celebrity permeates our own social lives, now that we are able to gaze at the carefully curated images and utterances of people we are actually acquainted with.