A recent study posted on Mashable.com suggests that the World Wide Web is actually making the web a happier place. Information technology (IT) access has been shown to increase a person’s sense of freedom by 15% and increase life satisfaction by 10%. The study is based on information collected from 35,000 people around the world and indicates that women along with individuals with lower-income and lower education benefit most from IT. The article doesn’t explain why women benefit the most from IT, but I suspect it has to do with raising children or health and beauty.

While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that social media overall is a positive contribution to the quality of life because there are many people who don’t use social media in a beneficial way, I would say that it does provide more opportunities to educate yourself without ever setting foot in classroom. The possibilities for what you can teach yourself by surfing the Internet are endless. I would image there are many self-taught scholars from the Internet. The wealth of information available to us will only continue to expand and grow as social media becomes more and more mainstream.

In the interest of keeping with the theme of happiness when it comes to information technology, I’m including the trailer for a new documentary entitled “Babies” (warning: you can’t watch this trailer without smiling) that I’m very excited to see. The film follows four babies from different countries around the world for the first year of their life and shows how drastically different their homes and upbringings are.

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