2008 Woodie Awards
Emotions are so hip
Beth Prosnitz
Issue date: 9/14/06 Section: Opinions
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Emotions are totally hip, and we all know that the hippest way to be emotional is to have a weblog. So as I perused the most recent Hartford Advocate, I learned that this hip emotional craze has surpassed my expectations. A website, wefeelfine.org, which was launched in 2005 and publicly opened in April of 2006, was designed to foster an even hipper, more emotional web site that fuses emotional outpours with digitized art. Totally fab.
The web site operates as follows: any writing that appears on websites such as LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket and Google are scanned for emotional content, documented, placed and eventually saved into the wefeelfine.com database.
"Every few minutes," write web site creators Jonathan Harris and Sepander Kamvar in the website's mission statement, "the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases 'I feel' and 'I am feeling.'"
Additional information provided on the blogs, including photos, gender and age identification, location and when the blog was posted, are snatched up and saved along with the writer's personal "I feel" statements. Superbly hip.
How fabulous is it that this website is so sensitive to the emotional needs of the online global community that it is alert and functioning at every minute of the day? Who doesn't appreciate that it continually scours the crevices of the global web in order to explore the profundity of individual and collective emotion? It is indubitably wonderful that someone has recognized that emotional expression needs its own forum in every capacity at every minute of the day.
One reputable function of the site is its ability to push for answers about important societal matters in its quest for emotional satisfaction. In order to do this, the website, as documented in its mission statement, asks the hard questions such as "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."
Wow. Provocative questions. I've always wanted to know just how Valentine's Day seeps into our inner souls and dictates our most personal of emotions. And what better way to access said emotion than to search LiveJournal? It's so profound that I can just feel it.
But profundity must be complemented with art, right? Right. Each owner of emotion transforms into a floating particle whose color is matched with the appropriate emotion. When clicked on, the particle reveals the emotive sentence or photograph that the web site has collected. The site has placed all of these particles and their emotions into "six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics and Mounds."
Emotions, art and alliteration all condensed into an autonomous soul-searching site. Who could have asked for anything more precise and perfectly hip?
The web site operates as follows: any writing that appears on websites such as LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket and Google are scanned for emotional content, documented, placed and eventually saved into the wefeelfine.com database.
"Every few minutes," write web site creators Jonathan Harris and Sepander Kamvar in the website's mission statement, "the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases 'I feel' and 'I am feeling.'"
Additional information provided on the blogs, including photos, gender and age identification, location and when the blog was posted, are snatched up and saved along with the writer's personal "I feel" statements. Superbly hip.
How fabulous is it that this website is so sensitive to the emotional needs of the online global community that it is alert and functioning at every minute of the day? Who doesn't appreciate that it continually scours the crevices of the global web in order to explore the profundity of individual and collective emotion? It is indubitably wonderful that someone has recognized that emotional expression needs its own forum in every capacity at every minute of the day.
One reputable function of the site is its ability to push for answers about important societal matters in its quest for emotional satisfaction. In order to do this, the website, as documented in its mission statement, asks the hard questions such as "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."
Wow. Provocative questions. I've always wanted to know just how Valentine's Day seeps into our inner souls and dictates our most personal of emotions. And what better way to access said emotion than to search LiveJournal? It's so profound that I can just feel it.
But profundity must be complemented with art, right? Right. Each owner of emotion transforms into a floating particle whose color is matched with the appropriate emotion. When clicked on, the particle reveals the emotive sentence or photograph that the web site has collected. The site has placed all of these particles and their emotions into "six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics and Mounds."
Emotions, art and alliteration all condensed into an autonomous soul-searching site. Who could have asked for anything more precise and perfectly hip?
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