Ted is one of Internet's best kept secrets

SOCIAL STUDIES - Published Monday May 25th, 2009

One of the best kept secrets of the internet is Ted.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design.

Way back in 1984 it started out as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. What happens is that the annual conference brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.

Those talks are recorded and made available free on the internet. It is even easy to remember, www.ted.com. I have watched an extreme sports fanatic talk about jumping off buildings, I have seen artists who are recreating the genre, I have listened to philosophers explain human nature. It is fascinating beyond belief.

Some of it is also so science fiction like that it makes you realize that none of us truly understand what the world is really like.

For example, today I watched a presentation by a man named Jonathan Harris that a friend of mine sent me the link to. Jonathan is a Brooklyn-based artist who uses the internet to create artistic representations of the feelings of its occupants.

In essence he has created a program which scans every single blog entry in the world looking for the word "feel". When it finds the word, it 'captures' the sentence; copies it, associates any photo that was posted with it, and compiles it.

Then there is a beautiful coloured representation with thousands of little dots on the screen. Each dot has a different colour for the type of emotion. For example, let's say all anger is red. The ball is larger or smaller depending on what the computer program judges to be the intensity of the emotion. Each bouncing ball is attributed a sex, a location, a time, and even the current weather all based on the person who wrote the blog.

Now for the amazing part; go log on to the site: wefeelfine.org and launch the program. You can watch and compile statistics about the world's emotions right now. You can see what pictures people are posting of themselves on blogs. You can look at a map and see where people who are "feeling" are in the world.

You can also see how today's feelings rank with normal. For example, when I checked during writing, people in the world were feeling "younger" at 19 times the normal level today. Of course, it is a nice day throughout much of the world.

On the one hand, this is incredibly cool; for many reasons; ranging from voyeuristic to scientific. What if you are feeling blue, all you have to do is ask it for others and you get a list of everyone who feels blue and you can read what they have written. I guarantee the reason we feel blue is because we feel like no one else feels like this.

Have you ever wondered what people really feel like when it is raining? Well, now we have a statistical and empirical tool to actually check. Or how about whether he weather affects women more than men? We can check whether people in Africa, Europe, Asia, or South or North America are happier.

It is astounding.

Of course, there is also a scary element to this to those of us who do not always think about how far what we say goes. It should serve as a warning that whenever a word leaves your mouth; either verbally or in print, there is no way to take it back.

This is especially true of what you publish to the Internet. Not only is it permanent; but literally anyone anywhere could access it. Be careful kiddies.

However, I still think the more emotions we can have out there the better.

Someone has described what Jonathan is doing as actually giving a soul to the Internet. Perhaps that is true, it certainly captures the emotions in a way we never would have thought of or believed. Now we have a global way to resonate with the people who use this medium; a sense of shared emotions, concerns, problems, triumphs and troubles that could help unite us.

How come it is so easy to write what you feel on a blog and not tell the person sitting next to you?

I swear we need to start talking more about emotions. My back hurts, I pulled something. I have a cold on what is arguably the nicest day yet this year. "I feel fine" seems like such an incomplete answer.

Especially when the wefeelfine web site lists literally thousands of ways to feel: from abandoned to zonked and everything in between. Imagine how much better our interpersonal relationships would be if we learned this language.

Are you happy? What if we responded, "No, not happy, I guess I feel fatalistic; like this is just how it is going to be forever?" Would that not open up a whole new kettle of fish, so to speak?

I truly think we sweep too many emotions under the rug, we fail to realize how much others have to guess about us; and how that means they make assumptions about us.

So let's start a worldwide revolution -- the next time someone asks you how you feel; do not say "fine." Then next time someone asks you how things are, do not say "good." There are a thousand possible answers and the more truthful we can be, the better we all are.