• community
• happiness

I've been thinking about "community" a lot lately, mostly due to the dissertation chapter I've been working on. And this story reminded me that you don't always get to choose your community...or your mood:

“Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don’t even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, to be published Friday in BMJ, a British journal.

Am I responsible for those that are "three degrees removed"? Am I responsible for their actions? Clearly, according to this study, I am (in DDD's words) response-able to them. I am exposed to them. This can mean terror and (according to the above study) happiness. You don't get one without the other.

We rhetoricians are very interested in how the R word builds community, but another way to think about this is: How does community happen to us? On Facebook, you can see all of the communities that might be making you happy by using the Nexus application. Take a look at your "Nexus" and you'll see that you are part of some strange communities, communities you did not choose. Are some of those people spreading happiness your way?

The researchers are not convinced that electronic interactions spread the happiness contagion, but I suspect that it's very difficult (or, at least, becoming very difficult) to pull apart our F2F and online communities. Either way, our various interactions expose us to others, and that can mean that "strangers may cheer you up." We can name the possibility of this contagion "community."

• Jim Brown's blog
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