Check this out, people.
Presenting “exploration of humans through the artifacts they leave behind on the Web.”
The idea of having an online database of every human emotion is truly mind-blowing.
Apparently this thing 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.).” Just imagine how many “I feels” it would extract just from this one blog only!
Interesting that it targets “I feels”. I wish I could get my hands on the Dorris Lessing passage from the Golden Notebook explaining how when writing about a particular feeling and emotion, we tend to make objective a very subjective emotion by phrasing it with an “I feel…” The passage goes on to describe the difference between “I am sad” vs. “I feel sad.” And I have to agree that there’s a pretty tangible difference between these two. I hope I can find that passage in the next couple of days, but for now the link will have to suffice, since I have laundry that needs to be done, a couple of runs that need to be ran, a room that needs to be cleaned and several hours of doing absolutely nothing to be enjoyed. However, comments on the aforementioned “I feel” vs. “I am sad” will be greatly appreciated and even rewarded.
1 comment:
I think there are interesting potential distinctions among the following three statements:
(1) "I feel sad," which is translatable to "I am experiencing sad feelings;"
(2) "I am sad," meaning something more like "my existence/being is best characterized as sad;"
(3) "I think I am sad," which might mean something like "reflecting cognitively, my current emotional experience or existence is marked by sadness."
People tend to use all three phrases on occasion. Do they really intend to express different ideas with each? Moreover, do the speakers of each of those phrases communicate something different--even just subtly--to the rest of the world when they use one versus the others?
If you ever find the Doris Lessing passage, I'd love to read it.
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