A SHOW OF FEELINGS

Blogs fulfil many functions: you can use it (interestingly or boringly) as a daily "Dear Diary..." or as a Commonplace Book; as a forum or debating chamber; as an entertainment and diversion for an audience considerably wider than the lone readership of the author; or, under the cloak of anonymity, as an electronic confessional...

What is common to many blogs is 'feelings': on one level they focus on the things about which bloggers feel passionate; on another, they provide a page of cyberspace on which to write about love, loneliness, happiness, sadness and anger.

My friend John van der Put (who's blog Being John van der Put is often concerned with feelings) told me about www.wefeelfine.org one the most exhilerating and existential websites dedicated to capturing the feelings of bloggers throughout the world...

The 'mission' of Jonathan Harris & Sepandar Kamvar's We Feel Fine is, as you will see, both simple and complex:

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion...


The color of each particle corresponds to the tone of the feeling inside – happy positive feelings are bright yellow, sad negative feelings are dark blue, angry feelings are bright red, calm feelings are pale green, and so on.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

If you've never visited WFF, this may be the beginning of an addiction...

However, a word of warning - go there at your liesure because this is no quick-fit web-site; it requires time: time to discover the different ways in which you can explore the feelings (there are six formal "movements" titled Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics and Mounds) and time to immerse yourself in these various expressions of emotion, just as you might spend time in wandering from picture to picture in an art gallery or in browsing through the pages of a volume of poetry...