We Feel Fine (?)

The Dow just fell another 508 points today. Maybe it's a good time to crowdsource a little empathy? If you haven't yet, check out We Feel Fine, Jonathan Harris' digital storytelling project. It harvests human feelings, in close to real-time, from the Net. It's a kind of minute-to-minute barometer of social well-being, culled from emotions expressed in everybody's blog postings—whether written from New York, Nairobi, or Vietnam. Harris harvests some 20,000 of these posts per day—just the ones that include the phrases "I feel" or "I am feeling." In the past three years, he's gathered more than 10 million entries. Go here to explore the site. Click on one of the floating dots. It's like taking the emotional pulse of the blogosphere.

Among some feelings expressed within the past hour:

* I am not making great claims for anything although I do feel we need to go for something more radical than state control of failing finance institutions
* I feel like I'm going to break in two
* I was a young volunteer for JFK and even Richard Milhous Nixon is beginning to feel warm and fuzzy compared to these guys
* I feel like a musician looking for a new piano

To see a short video of Harris explaining it all on Pangea Day in May, click HERE.

Organizers of last year's PICNIC conference in Amsterdam called Harris' work "one part computer science, one part anthropology, and one part visual art that seeks to explore and understand the human world through the artifacts people leave behind on the Web." For his part, Harris says We Feel Fine is "authored by everyone" and will "grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, in our hearts, and on our minds...I hope it makes the world seem a little smaller."

Harris' other Net storytelling projects explore human desire, modern mythology, science, news, and language. For more on Harris, go to his Web site, number27.org.

(Photograph of image on iron door by Knud Nielsen)

Pangea Day

At the Skoll Foundation's annual think-fest for social entrepreneurs at Oxford University a few weeks ago, Ken Brecher, a social anthropologist and executive director of the Sundance Institute—organizers of the annual Sundance film festival—defined good storytelling as an increasingly powerful tool for social change globally. "...Storytelling is the refusal to be laid low, incapacitated; it helps us to understand the meaning of things, not simply the value...The purpose of a good storytelling," he said, "is to assist us all to understand and to operate in the open and not wildly in the dark."

To be sure, documentary film—images, captured words, sounds—is the premier art form in today's globalizing world, Brecher believes: it is the medium of the moment. "At any one time," he says, "there is only one art form that is speaking. Once it was dance, then it was poetry, then the short story. Today it is film, and it feels to me that we need to make that connection now if we really want to see change happen in the world."

Indeed. This blog, Cause Global, is a new blog—one that will cover this art form-of-the-moment and the connections it makes (and attempts to make) globally. Ultimately, this blog will track some of the news and ideas and people in today's world who are seeking to use social media to to make a difference, affect change, and use the Web to make solutions to common social problems profitable—and real. Why this? I'm a journalist, and for me it's all about covering the unlikely alliances and conversations that serve as catalysts to social change and problem-solving around common challenges. Storytelling is a big part of today's social change movement—one that packs the emotional resonance to cut through the noise of everyday media. "In storytelling," says Brecher, "you have to incline the ears of your heart."

Storytelling moves to the masses this spring with Pangea Day, documentary filmmaker Jenhane Noujaim's 2006 TED Festival dream-come-true. Noujaim, whose 2004 film, Control Room, exposed the divergent ways Arabs and the West covered the onset and outbreak of the Iraq war, is one of the catalysts behind this spring's globally-produced Pangea Day, scheduled for May 10. The live event is planned as a simulcast of films, speakers, and music; sites in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked live that day to produce a 4-hour program, which will air on the Internet, television, digital cinemas, and mobile phones.

Raised in both Egypt and the United States, Noujaim says her aim is to explore culture as a driving force for both conflict and possibility. "I want to use the power of film to bridge gaps between people," she says. "...How are people supposed to communicate with each other globally...or move together into the future...when their stories aren't being told?"

What do you think? Check out the official trailer for Pangea Day HERE.