Can social networking make us happy?

Happiness has long been a topical issue for the UK media. 'Happiness may protect against breast cancer', 'Teach kids happiness? What a laugh' are just some of the headlines that have made the papers recently. Even my old local paper – The Bristol Evening Post – yesterday posted a story about university research into the sources of happiness.

Marketers have been quick to tap into our happiness obsession. Skoda, for instance, has been pushing the message: 'the manufacter of happy drivers' to communicate the brand's personality. Norwich Union has also been deploying similar tactics with its “quote me happy" strap-line.

But what is happiness? According to Nicholas Christakis and his team at the Harvard Medical School in Boston, people’s happiness depends not only on the happiness of an immediate friend but - to a lesser degree - on the happiness of their friend's friend, and their friend's friend's friend. The researchers discovered two factors are crucial to happiness: frequency of social contact and the strength of the relationship.

Surrounding yourself with happy social networks, it would seem, is key to our happiness – makes sense to me. But what about online social networking? What impact does this have on our happiness? According to New Scientist magazine no one is quite sure about the extent to which emotions can propagate through virtual networks. It would be interesting to find out how much your Facebook network of friends influence your day-to-day happiness, what impact the blogs you read have on your mood and to what extent Twitter updates make us smile. Until then looks like I'll have to keep checking Happy Tweets to make sure I'm sending out some happy vibes of my own.