Do you feel fine?

I came across this amazing website today when looking at incoming links to my blog.

We Feel Fine is a unique concept which “harvests human feelings” from across the internet.

The process is fairly simple:

“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 millions and millions of human feelings which increase by huge amounts each day. But, the thing I love most about We Feel Fine is the way these emotions appear on the screen – which is both beautiful and artistic. They whizz around as “particles” and their colour, shape and size indicate the feeling inside.

Is it a bit weird? Yes. Will everyone “get it”? No. But, amongst the thousands of repetitive things on the internet today this is a beautiful piece of living, breathing art which shows that online interaction is emotive and life changing, not cold and clinical.

Tags: Art, feelings, i feel fine, particles, social media, we feel fine