Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar's Monumental Work: We Feel Fine

Imagine a program that scans blogs created all over the world for one word. FEEL. The program scans thousands, no millions of blog posts for this one word. It grabs the sentence from beginning to end of punctuation and displays it on "We Feel Fine." Categorized by gender, location, and even the weather at the time, this website shows the thousands of feelings the world feels every day.

Harris jokes about reading of 20-year-old women living in Bangladesh writing about their feelings on a cloudy day. It's funny, yes? But no, the sheer complexity of this programming leaves me feeling very, very small.

To put it simply, its a global breakdown of what people feel in the last few hours. It sounds so simple but the scale it works on is staggering. Multi-colored dots representing a myriad of human emotions. It's the epitome of passive observance. There's simply not enough words in the English language to describe the scope of this finished (unfinished?) project. I won't attempt to come up with profound one-liners that have the world feel in them. It would be forced, insincere, and ungrateful to what Harris and Kamvar were trying to achieve.

Harris spoke about gaps—education, gender, religion, orientation, etc.—and how these gaps exist because of an individual's inherent need to identify to something. I would grant that. I'm an officer in organizations that proclaim to nurture diversity yet engender that one value by identifying its members as Asian, or Filipino, or Democratic, or... well, you get the idea. Are we separating ourselves? Maybe. But I think we're unwittingly creating connections out of our need to be individualistic. No one wants to be a cookie-cutter rendition of someone else. It's a classic case of twins choosing to dress differently from one another.

I want to be me. No one else is like me. This mindset forgets the fact that human emotions keep us chained (too harsh? how about tied?) together.

I want to go out on a limb and say that these aren't gaps. How about we try this metaphor on for size. These aren't gaps. Its a splatter of multi-colored paint on a dirty canvas.

Different colors, different shades: that's everyone in the world. But the paint is still wet and it runs down the length of the canvas. Some colors intermingle while others continue a solitary path down. Why is the canvas dirty? It's because not one generation starts on a clean slate. There's always something from the previous generation that trickles down to the next, modified to look slightly different, and we just eat it up and call it retro. Pat ourselves on the back for taking something from the past and improving it. Uh...no. The well of originality ran out long ago. Only a select few have tapped into a scant trickle of depth and ingenuity.

And before I beat that metaphor to death by getting all poetic, I think Harris is trying to show that the one thing that both separates and binds us together are our feelings. Whadaya know, we're all just a bunch of softies. Sentimental and all that jazz.

So some possible effects to viewing this website? Anyone trying to be an individual—what the hell does that even mean, anyway?—should get a rude awakening when he peruses this website. You think you're the only person in the world feeling this way. Well, sorry, about 23 other thousand people are feeling the same thing. They just don't belong in the same time zone. Or age zone. And it's probably cloudy over there while you sit under the sun.

On a lighter note. I thank whatever whim that caused me to pull out TED and watch videos in the presence of my friends. Maybe I should bring up more interesting websites and topics that I've read before. There's a reason why TED's my favorite website. I think it just earned a couple more points because my friends seemed to be interested in it too.

AND, because I couldn't resist:

I feel excited that I could share this discovery with my friends. Sometimes the best things come in small packages, i.e., implementation of binary numeral systems in digital electronic circuitry and logic gates packed internally into modern computers—such as the one I'm using to type this blog post. Being cheeky isn't a sin.