ABSTRACT
The emergence of the so-called “Web 2.0” or “social Web,” on which users generate and share content through activities such as blogging, media sharing, social networking, tagging, tweeting, virtual world gaming, wiki developing, and the like, has spawned a number of philosophical questions in its wake. The one I will take up in this chapter has a broad scope: How does everyday experience with the social Web help to shape individual wellbeing and the quality of life? According to the founder of Facebook, as of July 2010, over 500 million people were active users of that social networking site, a figure that leapt to 750 million in 2011 (Zuckerberg 2010 Protalinski 2011). Around the world, people sent nearly 50 million tweets per day in January 2010 as compared to just 5,000 a day in 2007 (Weil 2010). In 2007, there were half a million photos uploaded to Flickr (Kullin 2010); by September 2010, the number had risen to 5 billion (Sheppard 2010). Based on statistics such as these, social websites can be said to be thriving. To what extent do they also contribute to human flourishing—as Aristotle would put it, to living well and doing well?
