The Web's Secret Stories

Jonathan Harris speaks of the never ending World Wide Web. Harris created a secret experiment called "We Feel Fine" that involves everyone blogging (not sure if it did private blogs or just public). Searching the blogs for statements that begin with "I feel, I believe...and so on". From those prefixes of statements, Harris pulled what the ending of the sentence would be, such as 'I feel beautiful' and from that he created a project that would calculate many different features. It pulled over 20,000 feelings a day which were all from people stating in their blogs how they felt. From it, I began wondering, if people are constantly doing experiments on you and you never know, than they always will get the true you. He stated that the experiment was set up as a "passive observation on people that had no clue they were being watched, therefore I got very honest information". It makes you wonder how many people search the web doing experiments like those. "We Feel Fine" was very detailed with the information that it could pull, it showed that more women blogged about their feelings than men, as well as the ages and location of the person blogging. With all the information that Harris covered in his experiment, he began another experiment called "Universe" which would be like a spider web in English class. From one word, you could spawn off it in every direction that the topic was brought up in. For instance, if you put in the word "Hawaii" you would come up with words and pictures of islands and palm trees. During his speech he asked the question, "In today's society, what would the constellations in the night sky look like if we could make up new ones?". It puzzled me throughout the rest of the conversation and got me thinking about what it would look like. Putting together the two experiments that Harris created, I realized that the most prominent thing would be situations that had emotion. For instance, the tragedies of September 11th were shocking and horrific to everyone, not just the ones involved therefore I feel that the Twin Towers and the Pentagon would be two of the constellations. Also, things such as importance's to most people like rings, which symbolized weddings and love. Throughout his talk, Harris spoke of the many feelings people have and share, it makes you realize just how hurt, happy, mad, etc. someone can be at a time when they show photos of themselves during their time of the sentence. Harris is a very smart and talented person to create "We Feel Fine" and "Universe" and I think he did it to show just how often people share their feelings and why they felt that way on that day at that particular time.