One of my favorite Michael Jackson songs is “You Are Not Alone.” It’s almost tragically poetic that he could write such a beautiful song but not be able to hear his own lyrics. Isolated from the outside world after decades of controversy, it took his death for the country to really show how much they still loved and embraced Michael. But I’m straying from the real topic of this post, as I often do. The point is that everyone needs to be reminded that they are connected. As alone as they feel, there are people out there going through the same thing.
A while ago I stumbled onto this website called “We Feel Fine.” The system searches out blog entries that include the words “I feel (insert emotion),” or “I’m feeling…” When found, it records the full sentence and categorizes it according to the feeling expressed. It then organizes it into an interface with floating tons of particles, each representing a feeling posted in the blogosphere. Things like color, size or shape of the particle indicate the nature of the feeling. When you click on a particle it reveals the full sentence and any information it has about the author. You can also filter the particles by feeling, author’s sex, age, weather or location.
But more that just the random particles careening across the screen, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar have created six different movements (Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds) to categorize and display the information in real time. Basically it’s an infographic paradise.
During his TED talk, Harris said, “”I think people are very similar, but I also think we have trouble seeing that. As I look around the world, I see a lot of gaps, and I think we all see a lot of gaps. We define ourselves by our gaps: language gaps, ethnicity gaps, age gaps, gender gaps, sexuality gaps, wealth and money gaps, education gaps, religious gaps…but I think that actually despite our gaps, we really have a lot in common.”
