The titled question raised in my head when I read the following sentence in Gillian Brockell’s letter to the Tech companies: “when we millions of brokenhearted people…even answer your “Why?” with the cruel-but-true “It’s not relevant to me”…It decides you’ve given birth, assumes a happy result.” In class, we have discussed how cyberspace becomes a place for people to mourn. And in my experience, I have also read lots of posts and comments sharing depression, frustration, anger or even, occasionally, suspected suicide notes. However, as we see the happy design of Facebook “Year in Review” in Eric Meyer’s article, joy may still be the presumed dominant emotion on social networking sites.
This issue reminds me of a discussion on Weibo (a Chinese social networking site similar to Twitter, with more serious censorship though) some time ago (I am sorry I didn’t save the post so I cannot show it here). The topic is about Weibo deleting posts involving anger and negative emotion towards the authority. Accounts spreading “rumors” and arousing panic will get frozen. I am not going to discuss the controversy about censorship and public safety here. However, this Weibo policy definitely makes some people think that they are not allowed to express any negative emotion (although I don’t think this is the main intention of the law-makers). In the comment area, many users write sarcastically that from now on, you can only post happy lives online or else you are spreading panic/negative emotion because increasing happiness of all Chinese citizens is one of the nation’s policies. Too many negative emotion is a problem that needed to be controlled. Even now, when some people post some depressed or suspected suicide notes, there will always a few trolls who comment e.g. “yep you’re a loser, why don’t u just jump quickly. I have been waiting for you to jump for some hours.” I don’t know any of these trolls so I cannot tell why they say so. But I think the issue here is, for some reason, when we go online, we expect to see happy posts and comments, while negative posts will be seen as attention-seeking by some people. Therefore, although social networking sites are a private place to express our emotion freely, both positive and negative emotions, why do the tech companies and even users expect to see happiness online?