How Are You Feeling?
We Feel Fine[dot]org was created a couple of years ago and it’s tremendous fun to navigate around. If you’re not familiar with the site, it trawls all the blogs in the world for the expression “I feel” or “I am feeling” and then grabs the words that immediately follow. The site allows you to cross reference feelings by age, gender, weather, country and year - so for example you could see how 30-39 year old men in the UK were feeling in 2006 (9.4x more “positive” than normal, but also 1.3x more “weird”). It’s a brilliant social project. Creator Jonathan Harris can be seen here at TED talking about it.
I had high hopes for the site for it to answer some of the most pressing questions of the current day: are we happier and more optimistic now than 2 years ago? Are people in Boulder feeling freakier than those in Chicago? The way the site gathers information made some of these comparisons difficult to make, but what struck me was less the differences between cultures, and more the commonalities between people around the world. The most often cited feeling (whether in the USA, Iraq, France or Australia…or a dozen other places I searched) was “better” - even in today’s gloomy times.
The other top global feelings? “Guilty”, “Bad”, “Right”, “Good”. Sure, there’s nuances between places and ages and genders but fundamentally what this told me was how similar we all are and how fundamental human truths run between us all.
June 11th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
I’d argue that only knowing the one word to follow “I feel” doesn’t necessarily give us much… since feeling “better” might have been followed by “knowing the economy is screwing everyone equally” or… “because they only removed my left testacle instead of both.” Now give me TWO words and I could really get somewhere!!!
June 11th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
It captures the whole sentence after “I feel”, so you do get the context of each individual feeling, but it would be logged as “better” regardless of this context, so you’re right - it’s very reductive. Nevertheless - still a cool site to navigate around more as a work of socially generated “webart” than as a truly mind-blowing tool.
June 11th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Totally agree… the site is cool and the weblet interface thingy is fun to play with. Get this, I just opened the following quote: “I don’t like feeling guilty for the things I do” from some 21-year-old in Florida. Think about that… is this kid saying he regrets having a moral compass??? Gosh, if only murder or thievery weren’t such a downer!