We Feel Fine

If the world were a swirling vortex of conflicting emotions, We Feel Fine would be its pictorial representation. An “artwork authored by everyone”, the website is a shifting database of emotional registers built off the blogosphere’s daily lexicon of phrases, ranging anywhere from the ‘I feel fines’ to the heaviest heartbreaks imaginable. Constantly compiled from the diverse corners of the internet, the site is structured around six formal sections – Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics and Mounds – each of which offers a different visual representation of the general sentiments occurring around the world at any given moment. Their mission statement reads:

Since August 2005, 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. 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?

The website is beautiful to behold and frequently startling in its power to affect. From the most mundane to the most meaningful, We Feel Fine truly lives up to its mission, presenting a cross-section of the psychic lives of bloggers across the world.

We Feel Fine