We Feel Fine

24Sep11

When we began to discuss the segment of “beyond chat” in my Rhetoric of New Media class, I was reminded of a website I saw a while back called “We Feel Fine”. In asking the question of “What does a Very Large Scale Conversation Look Like?”, theorist Warren Sack tried to schematically represent the network and relationships of chat through the Conversation Map of people’s conversational threads. In the case of “We Feel Fine”, Jonathan Harris also sought to map out some property of human interactions on the internet, except his question of interest was, “What does a Very Large Scale Sample of Emotions across the Internet Look Like?”

The website survey all of the blogs across the internet, searching for terms or sentences that include the phrase “I feel…”.  Once found, the website grabs the sentence including the phrase and records the demographics, including the time, place, date, weather conditions, age of blogger, coountry of origin, and more. It then maps all of these emotions onto a pallet of colorful balls that float in a soup of emotions that you can click on to find out more. The diameter of the ball corresponds with length of sentence, and the colors match the emotion being expressed. The emotions can be filtered by the particular demographics, and it can also be expressed in different formats, including montage, interaction, and more.

This may sound like an obvious question, but what exactly is “beyond” element of mapping out emotions in this way? How does it comment on the medium through which we express our emotions on the internet, and what interesting things can we derive from seeing the snippets of stories of random people?

http://www.wefeelfine.org/

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