This cultural shift has had a conspicuous effect on the web, which prior to the advent of blogs had been a great resource for
These feelings are not unique to Meghan. The anthropologist Michael Wesch contends that
information and commerce, but not a very emotional space. Blogs—and the microblogs and social networks that followed—changed
people inherently crave both connection and freedom.4 This dichotomy creates a tension that
that. The web of machines has become a web of people, rich with emotion, relationships, love, and flaws, just as nuanced and complex
people often express by alternately opening up and closing off. We are frequently torn between
as the people who make it up.
building relationships and maintaining freedom from the constraints that those relationships
impose.
We Feel Fine was born in the summer of 2005, a few weeks before Meghan Orr wrote her first blog post. The two of us were
taking a road trip in Northern California, and the conversation turned to the emotional web, which by that point consisted not only of
millions of blogs but also of rapidly growing social networks like MySpace and Facebook. We wanted to make something that could
The initial sketch for the We Feel Fine
heart symbol, from 2005
distill the beauty, humanity, and complexity that we saw in the web. We came up with the idea of writing a computer program that
According to Wesch, technologies like blogs and videocasting offer the promise of connecting
without the constraints of commitment, which is why so many people take part. In the process,
bloggers enter a quasi-anonymous world, writing about themselves to an audience they don’t know
and don’t see. In this world everything is remembered, and anybody, including the blogger herself,
would continuously crawl all blogs on the web and extract any sentence containing the words “I feel” or “I am feeling.”
can revisit any post at any time. The combination of physical distance and anonymity inspires intense self-reflection and remarkable
depth on the part of the bloggers. “It’s funny,” writes Michelle Fry in her September 21st, 2005, blog post, “but I don’t talk much in
Over the next several months, we wrote the code for We Feel Fine. We wrote backend infrastructure that would scan the
blogosphere every minute and populate a live database of emotions, and a series of frontend visualizations that would allow people to
person. Yet, I can write and write.” Blogging, she says, “is a good way of exploring ideas at length without the anxiety of having a one
see and interact with these emotions. Since many blog authors include biographical information on their blog profile pages, we could
on one conversation. You can take your time with writing and take one thought at a time.”5
identify which feelings came from men or women, from 18-year-olds or 60-year-olds, from people in New York City or people in
Tokyo. If a blog post contained both a feeling sentence and an image, we decided to overlay the sentence on top of the image to form
or anxiety.” As readers, we can take our time, stare at people, and see them for who they are. Sometimes we can foster connections
what we call a “montage” composition. We have included many of our favorite montages in this book.
with bloggers that are more intimate than many real-life connections, because in real life it is impolite to stare.
Concurrently, this same distance and anonymity allow blog readers, in the words of Wesch, “to experience humanity without fear
In May 2006 we launched the project at wefeelfine.org. We never expected the site to be as popular as it ended up being.
Millions of people from all over the world have visited it. Newspapers, magazines, TV shows, and blogs have covered it, and museums
By 2008, We Feel Fine had existed for two years and there were more than 10 million feelings in its database. However, there was still
from Athens to Houston to Melbourne have exhibited it. As for us, we could not stop looking at the blogs of the thousands of strangers
some work that we wanted to do. We wanted to curate and present some of our favorite feelings from the more than 10 million in our
whose feelings appeared on the site each day. We were consumed by a sense of empathy for people who we had never met, and at
database, and we wanted to dive more deeply into the statistics of emotion. How do men feel differently from women? How do our
times we felt like we were looking in the mirror.
emotions change as we grow older? What are the biggest drivers of jealousy? What causes sorrow?
Screenshots from the interactive
website, www.wefeelfine.org.
Clockwise from far left: the Madness
movement, showing the most recent
2,000 feelings represented as rainbowcolored dots; viewing a single sentence,
or Murmur; the Mobs movement,
showing the most common feelings
overall; the search panel, allowing
viewers to browse feelings from specific
demographic groups; the Metrics
movement, showing the current
weather breakdown of the most recent
2,000 feelings.
“I actually see a lot of myself in Billy,” writes Meghan in her first blog post. “Maybe that’s why I’m so intrigued by him...
Sometimes I really open up with people and show them how much I love them and how much they mean to me. Other times I feel so
closed off from everyone and everything, like I am in my own world, and I am just running away.”
“I feel like in some way or another we are all struggling for freedom... And what does that mean? To be free from worry? To be
free from self doubt? To be free from sin? To be free from what the world says we should be? To be free to love? To be free to hate?
To be free from the constraints of our culture and society?”3
We chose to present this emotional deep dive as a book rather than as another website because we felt the content would
resonate more if people were given the chance to unplug and slow down. As technologists, we love how the web enables freedom and
connectivity, but we also understand that too much technology can have the opposite effect.
Meghan, in writing about Billy the Cat’s views on technology, wrote: “I think that if I were Billy I would also want to pee on my
cell phone. I continue to struggle with all these electronic gadgets that are supposed to be bringing us all this increased freedom, when
really it seems to me as if we are becoming their slaves.”6
This is not, fundamentally, a book about technology (although we couldn’t have written the book without it). This is a book about
the human condition. As we said when we first launched We Feel Fine in 2006, we hope it makes the world seem a bit smaller, and that
it helps people see the beauty of the everyday ups and downs of life.
1. Meghan Orr. http://lifethroughmeghanseyes.blogspot.com/2005/09/billy-cat-its-kind-of-funny-to-me-that.html
2. Justin Hall. http://www.links.net/vita/web/start/original.html
3. Meghan Orr. See 1.
4. Wesch, Michael. “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAaO-lZ4_hU
5. Michelle Fry. http://verbalblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/midnight-in-garden-of-good-and-evil.html
6. Meghan Orr. See 1.
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