2008 Feelings: Overwhelmed & Used
Recently I came across the site We Feel Fine, which from the site:
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved. The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day.
I read this and was intrigued, so I figured I would test it out. Below is my test. I compared the year 2007 to the year 2008 for the US. The list goes on even though I’ve only listed the top 5.
I’m amazed that 2007 and 2008 are so different. What’s most interesting to me is that overwhelmed is number 1 in 2008, even though it’s not even in the top 5 in 2007 (or in the top 16). I think that is actually a very accurate word to describe how people feel in 2008. Also, the fact that used pops up in 2008 is also very telling (it is also not on the list in 2007).
We are feeling overwhelmed and used.
Most representative feelings from 2007
Most representative feelings from 2008
