"Mirror, Mirror on the wall . . . where did he go, and why doesn't he call?"

Do We Really Feel Fine?





I came across this really interesting site today called We Feel Fine. Their mission is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale. The site is actually facinating. Here's an excerpt of what it is that the site does:

"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."


The system then creates bouncing "particles" to represent each feeling collected. These particles bounce around randomly on the screen and each color represents the feeling behind the emotion that was retrieved. Once you click on a bouncing particle, the emotion and text that was written is displayed.

You can display these emotions in several different formats which are listed along the left side of the bouncing particle screen. I decided to play around a bit and see what others are feeling out there. When I requested a display in the metrics mode, feeling overwhelmed was the number one emotion and it was being felt at 5 times the normal level. Hmmmm. . . .

In the mounds mode, it displays that the bulk of people at the moment are feeling better, but right on it's tails are thousands of people who are feeling bad and lot's of people are feeling sorry.

What does all of this say about the state of fragile human emotions? Seems that many of us carry negative feelings throughout our daily lives.

I'd like to hear from you. What do you do to alleviate yourself of negative thoughts or regretful feelings? And what do you think about humanities current state of emotion?

Related Posts with Thumbnails

2 Comments:

Anonymous said...

I take this from the Buddha Philosophy on one's psychology; never let your emotions get too high so then you will never get too low. It is the same concept with drinking coffee or any stimulant. If you get hyped on it, you will surely come down just as fast and hard. Emotions are the same way. We must find a place of neutrality where we can acknowledge the emotion but never get overwhelmed by it because we realize it is just a momentary feeling. It is interesting beacuse this affect even though a state of neutrality, brings a wonderful sense of happiness and balance to one's life!

Anonymous said...

Well said, Anonymous, and SO true! I'm one to find myself in a certain "mood" for no apparent reason only to find, if I search my thoughts or what I've taken...eaten...I'll find the reason for that mood I'm in. Only then am I able to change it.

Post a Comment

 
The Mirror of Aphrodite. Artwork by Neoclyptic. Design by Wpthemedesigner. Converted To Blogger Template By Anshul Tested by Blogger Templates.