“Cannery Row,” wrote John Steinbeck in his 1945 novel of that name, “is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.” Were he alive today, Steinbeck, agog at the Net’s myriad marvels, might write, “The United States of America is a poke, a tweet, an autotune, an LOL, a fail, a power chord, a synth hook, a meme.”

Peter Sheridan Dodds and Christopher M. Danforth, two University of Vermont statisticians, have rather boldly suggested that such are the contents of the nation’s collective psyche. The August 3, 2009 edition of The New York Times reports on a paper Dodds and Danforth recently published. In it, they argue that

linguistic analysis — not just of song lyrics but of blogs and speeches — could add a new and valuable dimension to a growing area of mass psychology: the determination of national well-being.

That’s right: whether it’s bloggers raging about naked shorting or it’s pop stars auto-crooning about naked shorties, what’s expressed is not merely one person’s mood, but an entire country’s.

Taking the emotional temperature of the whole population represents an enormous undertaking, one requiring massive amounts of data compilation and processing. Dodds and Danforth have shown themselves equal to the challenge, however. The Times story describes their research method:

Dr. Dodds and Dr. Danforth downloaded the lyrics to 232,574 songs by 20,025 artists released between 1960 and 2007, from the Web site hotlyrics.net. From another site, wefeelfine.org, they pulled more than nine million sentences that used some form of the verb feel — as in “I feel relieved” — from 2.3 million blogs from 2005 to 2009. They also analyzed State of the Union speeches going back to George Washington’s. They then rated the psychological charge, or “valence,” of a significant subset of the words on a 10-point scale: from triumphant (8.82) and love (8.72) down to disgusted (2.45) and suicide (1.25).

In its broad strokes, Dodds and Danforth’s method bears superficial resemblance to maverick literary scholar Franco Moretti’s critical practice of “distant reading” (the subject of an earlier entry). But whereas Moretti pursues a conception of literature as a “system” consisting of so many bits of quantifiable data in the form or literary tropes and themes, Dodds and Danforth seek nothing less than the development of a technology. In their paper, they admit their study was guided by a desire for

some form of transparent, non-reactive, population-level hedonometer … which would remotely sense and quantify emotional levels, either post hoc or in real time.

And, indeed, Dodds and Danforth proclaim that their study represents the first tentative steps in the direction of this brave new technology:

We have examined nearly 10 million blog sentences retrieved via the website http://www.wefeelfine.org, as we have described in detail above. In focusing on this subset of sentences, we are attempting to use our valence measures not only to estimate perceived valence but also the revealed emotional states of blog authors. We are thus able to present results from what might be considered a very basic remote-sensing hedonometer.

Now, the very idea of a remote-sensing hedonometer seems right out of second-rate science fiction. Dodds and Danforth don’t see it this way, though; and it appears that they’re winning converts.  Again the Times article:

“The new approach that these researchers are taking is part of movement that is really exciting, a cross-pollination of computer science, engineering and psychology,” said James W. Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas. “And it’s going to change the social sciences; that to me is very clear.”

In what manner, one asks, will the social sciences be changed? Will they, armed with a dazzling new gadget  like a remote-sensing hedonometer, move from being descriptive to predictive disciplines — or even (Heaven forbid!) to prescriptive ones? One can easily imagine this technology falling into the hands of the behaviorialist economists in the Obama administration, who’d use it to goose citizens’ animal spirits whenever they should quail before whatever shadow-market predations await them.

Mirth of a nation: tapping tunes and blogs to measure the pleasure.

At any rate, a method like remotely sensed hedonometrics sure seems like one more creepy step in the direction of the “totally administered life” Frankfurt-Schoolers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer warned of way back in the 1940s — a particularly formidable arrow in the quiver of those who would institute a hegemonic, all-ensnaring ideology that “preforms every sector of modern existence, including language and perception,” in its bid for “objective necessity.”

Or perhaps French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower comes closer to what Dodds and Danforth’s remote-sensing hedonometer actually means. Maybe this technology will, as Foucault writes, prove to be the technology to “[bring] life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and [make] knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life.”

Such sinister eventualities as those envisioned by Foucault, Adorno and Horkheimer presume, of course, that Dodds and Danforth’s science checks out. Their study, the Times story reports, has met with some skepticism:

Researchers who specialize in analyzing mass measures of well-being are skeptical about what a content analysis of pop culture can really say, at least as a stand-alone measure.

“The approach is interesting, but I don’t see any evidence that the method produces a valid population-based measure of well-being,” Uli Schimmack, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, wrote in an e-mail message.

Whether Dodds and Danforth’s hedonometer proves boffo or bunk remains to be seen. It does, however, throw a penetrating light on present circumstances. It reveals an unsettling general trend toward the conversion of the social sphere into a mis en scène of manipulation — a giant Skinner box of subtle complexity and variety, but a Skinner box nonetheless. Which once again highlights the moral depths to which the human species has sunk. Ethics have gone from Kant to “quants,” from a sense of the other as inviolably an end in herself to a sense of her as a profit center to be squeezed for optimal gain. And with remotely sensed hedonometrics, as with all such behavioralism in the social and economic sciences, folks will find themselves increasingly hemmed in by constantly refined and supple techniques of influence, techniques now borne by the anonymous ventriloquism of libertarian paternalism as opposed to the blunt exhortations of yesterday’s authoritarianism.