Legal Research

The Friday Fillip

By Simon Fodden

And how are we feeling today?

A feeling might be the most private thing — experience — we have. It seems to happen deeper inside us than our heady thoughts. But very very often, what inside will out. And nowadays that outing of our feelings takes place on the internet, thanks to the facilities of Twitter, Facebook, Buzz and all the usual suspects.

What if someone collected all of those expressions of emotion and made them available to the curious? If someone did that it would look like We Feel Fine by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. These guys build a bot that trolls the net looking for “I feel…” and similar precursors to emotional confession. The latest instances are then made available to us, the curious, in a variety of ways.

We Feel Fine is a dynamic visual display of these flecks of feeling. Launch the Flash viewer and see a blizzard of swirling dots, each an atom of emotion from someone somewhere. A click on the dot pops up a precis of the feeling statement and maybe an associated picture. But if everything is too much for you, you can filter by feeling (“sarcastic” “unappreciated”), gender, age, weather (!), and location, until you’re looking at just those instances that interest you. You can also simply call up various displays of current expressions of feeling with the simple menu at the bottom left. (The accompanying graphic — click to enlarge — is an illustration of one such display.)

Even a few dancing dots too much on a Friday? Well, We Feel Fine is also a book. (There: that feels better, no?) You can buy it at Amazon, but the internet being what it is, you can also see (some of) it online or download the selected pages as PDF files. The book, as you might imagine, provides some editorial discussion of emotions in addition to notable excerpts from the rest of us.

So how do you feel now? Curious? Disgusted? Indifferent? Check out We Feel Fine and find out who else has that same private emotion right now.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on March 05, 2010 (boomark / email).