The Internet And Emotions

It's an absolute fact that social media and the Internet have  fundamentally changed every part of our society. We're closer to each  other now than we've ever been. No longer locked down by the  geographical constraints of old, groups and societies are forming  globally and people are connecting in a way the world has never seen  before.

As an ad creative I spend most of my time thinking about digital and social media in terms of brands: How we can use it to shift product? How we can increase loyalty and bring a consumer closer to the brand? But every now and again I step back and look at what digital media artists are doing to explore the deeper side of social media: the emotional, human side.

Below are two great, inspiring projects by some very talented artists that explore the Internet and emotions.

The first project is by Jonathon Harris entitled We Feel Fine. The site has been up for about 2 years now, but if you haven't explored in a while or ever, it's well worth spending some time with. We Feel Fine takes tweets, posts, updates from social media channels and groups them by emotion. What's particularly interesting about this project is how it taps into the guilty human pleasure of voyeurism. Peeking into someone's life on an emotional level such as this, or on a surface level such as looking through someone's facebook photo's is, as much as we mightn't like to admit it, one of the attractions of social media.  As the artist himself puts it:

"It  is about creating an ever-changing portrait of the emotional landscape  of the human world.  It is about creating a two-way mirror — where  viewers simultaneously experience a God-like voyeurism (spying on the  feelings of others) and a bashful vulnerability (realizing their own  words and pictures are in there, too).  When these two feelings mix  together (voyeurism and vulnerability), the hope is that they produce a  kind of humbling empathy — demonstrating that individual experiences are  actually universal."

The second project by two artists Theo Watson and Kyle McDonaldand captures positive human emotions to the Internet. Happy Things is an opensource program that uses the webcam on your computer to analyze your face when you're browsing  and posts your screenshot every time it detects you smiling, along with  the web page that you found amusing.

This project is more about measuring the personal emotion of happiness rather than the collective emotions of We feel Fine. What it gives you is something akin to personal online happiness analytics: a way of understanding what it is about the Internet that makes you happy.

Both projects show that the new Social Internet can be used for more than advertising and can contribute to human society on a deeper, human level. Very inspiring stuff.

Info and Imagery via: PSFK and Welcome To Optimism