I think we’ve all been guilty of the unthinking “fine thanks” when someone asks us how we are. All over the world we’re all saying we’re feeling fine, but how are we really feeling?
We Feel Fine, created by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar and authored by “everyone” is a pretty gorgeous exploration for the answer. Since August 2005 it has been constantly combing blogs for the phrase “I feel” or “I am feeling” and recording them. Because blogs are structured largely in standard ways, it can often extract the age, gender and geographical location of the author as well. To add another layer of data, it also checks the weather at the time the phrase was written.
From their mission statement:
“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? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? 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. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds. “
A click can take you into the heartbreak of someone’s breakup, or the joy of new love. It’s a beautiful, sometimes sweet sometimes tragic, look into the lives of others. And a great reminder that there are so many better answers to the question “how are you?”.
