To create my “Weathermap of Feeling” I collected information twice every day for two weeks. I searched for happy and sad in Google News and Google blogs, I recorded the weather, and I jotted down my current feelings. At first glance, even organized in Flash under buttons for each day, the amount of information is staggering and doesn’t appear to follow a particular pattern. However, upon closer examination, various trends could be extricated from the confusing whole.
I realized that it was much easier to find sad news and blogs than happy ones. This was probably because people like to hear about the misfortunes of others, since that often makes them feel better about their own lives. Happy searches, especially for blogs, were more likely to bring up birthday and holiday greetings than the feelings of people who claimed to be happy. I believe this is because people generally write in blogs, diaries, what have you when they are sad or upset and want to get thing off their chest. When they are happy, they simply enjoy living life and generally don’t bother writing about it.
Conversely, the pictures found in the blogs were more likely to be happy since people tend to at least put on a happy face when they think they are being watched (whether by other people or by a camera) and also because people usually take pictures of happy events. The pictures in the news, however, were more likely to be sad because of reasons mentioned above. One final connection I was able to draw independently was that the weather didn’t seem to affect people’s feelings, especially since the weather report was only for Poughkeepsie and the blogs and news reports came from all over the country.
I compared my weathermap with those of Jennifer, Melissa H., and Melissa G. and we drew some similar conclusions as a group as those that I was able to surmise independently. Two trends that we found were, in economics, that gas prices are going up and, in entertainment, that people seem to be obsessed with Brittany Spears. The gas price increase seems to have the potential to affect the emotional climate, but little emotional connection can be drawn from America’s fixation on the lives of certain celebrities.
In order to see if our data coincided, we all looked at what we had found for October 28th and there were definitely some connections. We discovered that we had all found news stories about various schools and how the administration is exerting its authority in various ways. Some schools banned halloween costumes while others banned peanut butter. This trend reveals that people today are very interested in what is going on in schools. The news that day also provided updates on the fires in California as well as progress in the writer’s strike, which showed that people are more inclined to write about unpleasant occurences than happier ones. Overall, we found that in the course of two weeks, happy and sad events and feelings balanced out, creating a neutral, perhaps even impassive emotional climate.
