The Web's secret stories

So I really consider myself a storyteller. But I don't really tell stories

in the usual way, in the sense that I don't usually tell my own
stories. Instead, I'm really interested in building tools that allow large
numbers of other people to tell their stories, people all around the
world. I do this because I think that people actually have a lot in
common. I think people are very similar, but I also think that we have
trouble seeing that.You know, as I look around the world I see a lot of
gaps, and I think we all see a lot of gaps. And we define ourselves by
our gaps. There's language gaps, there's ethnicity and racial gaps,
there's age gaps, there's gender gaps, there's sexuality gaps, there's
wealth and money gaps, there's education gaps, there's also religious
gaps. You know, we have all these gaps and I think we like our
gaps because they make us feel like we identify with something, some
smaller community. But I think that actually, despite our gaps, we really
have a lot in common. And I think one thing we have in common is a very
deep need to express ourselves. I think this is a very old human desire.
It's nothing new.
But the thing about self-expression is that there's traditionally been
this imbalance between the desire that we have to express
ourselves and the number of sympathetic friends who are willing to
stand around and listen.This, also, is nothing new. Since the dawn of
human history, we've tried to rectify this imbalance by making art,
writing poems, singing songs, scripting editorials and sending them in to
a newspaper, gossiping with friends. This is nothing new.
What's new is that in the last several years a lot of these very
traditional physical human activities, these acts of self-expression,
have been moving onto the Internet. And as that's happened, people
have been leaving behind footprints, footprints that tell stories of
their moments of self-expression. And so what I do is, I write
computer programs that study very large sets of these footprints, and
then try to draw conclusions about the people who left them -- what
they feel, what they think, what's different in the world today than
usual, these sorts of questions.One project that explores these
ideas, which was made about a year ago, is a piece called We Feel
Fine. This is a piece that every two or three minutes scans the world's
newly-posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" or "I
am feeling." And when it finds one of those phrases, it grabs the
sentence up to the period, and then automatically tries to deduce the
age, gender and geographical location of the person that wrote that
sentence. Then, knowing the geographical location and the time, we can
also then figure out the weather when that person wrote the
sentence. All of this information is saved in a database that collects
about 20,000 feelings a day. It's been running for about a year and a
half. It's reached about seven-and-a-half million human feelings
now. And I'll show you a glimpse of how this information is then
visualized. So this is We Feel Fine.What you see here is a madly
swarming mass of particles, each of which represents a single human
feeling that was stated in the last few hours. The color of each
particle corresponds to the type of feeling inside -- so that happy,
positive feelings are brightly colored. And sad, negative feelings are
darkly colored. The diameter of each dot represents the length of the
sentence inside, so that the large dots contain large sentences, and the
small dots contain small sentences. Any dot can be clicked and
expanded. And we see here, "I would just feel so much better if I
could curl up in his arms right now and feel his affection for me in the
embrace of his body and the tenderness of his lips." So it gets pretty
hot and steamy sometimes in the world of human emotions. And all of
these are stated by people: "I know that objectively it really doesn't
mean much, but after spending so many years as a small fish in a big
pond, it's nice to feel bigger again."The dots exhibit human qualities.
They kind of have their own physics, and they swarm wildly around, kind
of exploring the world of life. And then they also exhibit curiosity. You
can see a few of them are swarming around the cursor right now. You
can see some other ones are swarming around the bottom left corner
of the screen around six words. Those six words represent the six
movements of We Feel Fine. We're currently seeing Madness. There's
also Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics and Mounds. And I'll walk you
through a few of those now. Murmurs causes all of the feelings to fly
to the ceiling. And then, one by one, in reverse chronological
order, they excuse themselves, entering the scrolling list of feelings. "I
feel a bit better now.""I feel confused and unsure of what the hell I
want to do." "I feel gypped out of something awesome here." "I feel so
free; I feel so good." "I feel like I'm in this fog of depression that I
can't get out of." And you can click any of these to go out and visit the
blog from which it was collected. And in that way, you can connect with
the authors of these statements if you feel some degree of
empathy.The next movement is called Montage. Montage causes all of
the feelings that contain photographs to become extracted and display
themselves in a grid. This grid is then said to represent the picture of
the world's feelings in the last few hours, if you will. Each of these can
be clicked and we can blow it up. We see, "I just feel like I'm not going
to have fun if it's not the both of us." That was from someone in
Michigan. We see, "I feel like I have been at a computer all day."
These are automatically constructed using the found objects: "I think
I feel a little full."
The next movement is called mobs. Mobs provides different statistical
breakdowns of the population of the world's feelings in the last few
hours. We see that "better" is the most frequent feeling right
now, followed by "good," "bad," "guilty," "right," "down," "sick" and so
on. We can also get a gender breakdown. And we see that women are
slightly more prolific talking about their emotions in the last few hours
than men. We can do an age breakdown, which gives us a histogram of
the world's emotional distribution by age. We see people in their
twenties are the most prolific, followed by teenagers, and then people
in their thirties, and it dies out very quickly from there. In weather,
the feelings assume the physical characteristics of the weather that
they represent, so that the ones collected on a sunny day swirl around
as if they're part of the sun. The cloudy ones float along as if they're
on a breeze. The rainy ones fall down as if they're in a rainstorm, and
the snowy ones kind of flutter to the ground.
Finally, location causes the feelings to move to their positions on a
world map showing the geographical distribution of feelings. Metrics
provides more numerical views on the data. We see that the world is
feeling "used" at 3.3 times the normal level right now.
They're feeling "warm" at 2.9 times the normal level, and so on. Other
views are also available. Here are gender, age, weather, location.
The final movement is called Mounds. It's a bit different from the
others. Mounds visualizes the entire dataset as large, gelatinous
blobs which kind of jiggle. And if I hold down my cursor, they do a little
dance. We see "better" is the most frequent feeling, followed by
"bad." And then if I go over here, the list begins to scroll, and there
are actually thousands of feelings that have been collected. You can see
the little pink cursor moving along, representing our position. Here we
see people that feel "slipping," "nauseous," "responsible."
There's also a search capability, if you're interested in finding out
about a certain population. For instance, you could find women who feel
"addicted" in their 20s when it was cloudy in Bangladesh.
But I'll spare you that. So here are some of my favorite montages that
have been collected: "I feel so much of my dad alive in me that there
isn't even room for me." "I feel very lonely." "I need to be in some
backwoods redneck town so that I can feel beautiful." "I feel invisible
to you." "I wouldn't hide it if society didn't make me feel like I needed
to." "I feel in love with Carolyn." "I feel so naughty." "I feel these
weirdoes are actually an asset to college life.""I love how I feel
today."So as you can see, We Feel Fine uses a technique that I call
"passive observation." What I mean by that is that it passively
observes people as they live their lives. It scans the world's blogs and
looks at what people are writing, and these people don't know they're
being watched or interviewed. And because of that, you end up getting
very honest, candid, sincere responses that are often very moving. And
this is a technique that I usually prefer in my work because people
don't know they're being interviewed. They're just living life, and they
end up just acting like that.Another technique is directly questioning
people. And this is a technique that I explored in a different
project, the Yahoo! Time Capsule, which was designed to take a
fingerprint of the world in 2006. It was divided into ten very simple
themes -- love, anger, sadness and so on -- each of which contained a
single, very open-ended question put to the world: What do you love?
What makes you angry? What makes you sad? What do you believe in?
And so on. The time capsule was available for one month
online, translated into 10 languages, and this is what it looked like. It's
a spinning globe, the surface of which is entirely composed of the
pictures and words and drawings of people that submitted to the time
capsule. The ten themes radiate out and orbit the time capsule. You can
sift through this data and see what people have submitted. This is in
response to, What's beautiful? "Miss World."There are two modes to
the time capsule. There's One World, which presents the spinning
globe, and Many Voices, which splits the data out into film strips and
lets you sift through them one by one. So this project was punctuated
by a really amazing event, which was held in the desert outside
Albuquerque in New Mexico at the Jemez Pueblo, where for three
consecutive nights, the contents of the capsule were projected onto
the sides of the ancient Red Rock Canyon walls, which stand about 200
feet tall. It was really incredible. And we also projected the contents
of the time capsule as binary code using a 35-watt laser into outer
space. You can see the orange line leaving the desert floor at about a
45 degree angle there. This was amazing because the first night I
looked at all this information and really started seeing the gaps that I
talked about earlier -- the differences in age, gender and wealth and so
on.But, you know, as I looked at this more and more and more, and saw
these images go across the rocks, I realized I was seeing the same
archetypal events depicted again and again and again. You know:
weddings, births, funerals, the first car, the first kiss, the first camel
or horse -- depending on the culture. And it was really moving. And this
picture here was taken the final night from a distant cliff about two
miles away, where the contents of the capsule were being beamed into
space. And there was something very moving about all of this human
expression being shot off into the night sky.And it started to make me
think a lot about the night sky, and how humans have always used the
night sky to project their great stories. You know, as a child in
Vermont, on a farm where I grew up, I would often look up into the
dark sky and see the three star belt of Orion, the Hunter. And as an
adult, I've been more aware of the great Greek myths playing out in
the sky overhead every night. You know, Orion facing the roaring
bull. Perseus flying to the rescue of Andromeda. Zeus battling Chronos
for control of Mount Olympus. I mean, these are the great tales of the
Greeks.And it caused me to wonder about our world today. And it
caused me to wonder specifically, if we could make new constellations
today, what would those look like? What would those be? If we could
make new pictures in the sky, what would we draw? What are the great
stories of today?And those are the questions that inspired my new
project, which is debuting here today at TED. Nobody's seen this yet,
publicly. It's called Universe: Revealing Our Modern Mythology. And it
uses this metaphor of an interactive night sky. So, it's my great
pleasure now to show this to you.So, Universe will open here. And you'll
see that it leads with a shifting star field, and there's an Aurora
Borealis in the background, kind of morphing with color. The color of
the Aurora Borealis can be controlled using this single bar of color at
the bottom, and we'll put it down here to red. So you see this kind of --
these stars moving along.Now, these aren't just little points of light,
little pixels. Each of those stars actually represents a specific event in
the real world -- a quote that was stated by somebody, an image, a
news story, a person, a company. You know, some kind of heroic
personality. And you might notice that as the cursor begins to touch
some of these stars, that shapes begin to emerge. We see here
there's a little man walking along, or maybe a woman. And we see here a
photograph with a head. You can start to see words emerging here. And
those are the constellations of today. And I can turn them all on, and
you can see them moving across the sky now.This is the universe of
2007, the last two months. The data from this is global news
coverage from thousands of news sources around the world. It's using
the API of a really great company that I work with in New York,
actually, called Daylife. And it's kind of the zeitgeist view at this
level of the world's current mythology over the last couple of
months.So we can see where it's emerging here, like President
Ford, Iraq, Bush. And we can actually isolate just the words -- I call
them secrets -- and we can cause them to form an alphabetical list. And
we see Anna Nicole Smith playing a big role recently. President Ford --
this is Gerald Ford's funeral. We can actually click anything in
Universe and have it become the center of the universe, and
everything else will enter its orbit. So, we'll click Ford, and now that
becomes the center. And the things that relate to Ford enter its
orbit and swirl around it.We can isolate just the photographs, and we
now see those. We can click on one of those and have the photograph
be the center of the universe. Now the things that relate to it are
swirling around. We can click on this and we see this iconic image of
Betty Ford kissing her husband's coffin.In Universe, there's kind of no
end. It just goes infinitely, and you can just kind of click on stuff. This
is a photographic representation, called Snapshots. But we can actually
be more specific in defining our universe. So, if we want to, let's check
out what Bill Clinton's universe looks like. And let's see, in the past
week, what he's been up to. So now, we have a new universe, which is
just constrained to all things Bill Clinton. We can have his constellations
emerge here. We can pull out his secrets, and we see that it has a lot
to do with candidates, Hillary, presidential, Barack Obama. We can see
the stories that Bill Clinton is taking part in right now. Any of those can
be opened up. So we see Obama and the Clintons meet in Alabama. You
can see that this is an important story; there are a lot of things in its
orbit. If we open this up, we get different perspectives on this
story. You can click any of those to go out and read the article at the
source. This one's from Al Jazeera.We can also see the superstars.
These would be the people that are kind of the looming heroes and
heroines in the universe of Bill Clinton. So there's Bill Clinton,
Hillary, Iraq, George Bush, Barack Obama, Scooter Libby -- these are
kind of the people of Bill Clinton. We can also see a world map, so this
shows us the geographic reach of Bill Clinton in the last week or so. We
can see he's been focused in America because he's been campaigning,
probably, but a little bit of action over here in the Middle East. And
then we can also see a timeline. So we see that he was a bit quiet on
Saturday, but he was back to work on Sunday morning, and actually
been tapering off since then this week.And it's not limited to just
people or dates, but we can actually put in concepts also. So if I put in
climate change for all of 2006, we'll see what that universe looks
like. Here we have our star field. Here we have our shapes. Here we
have our secrets. So we see again, climate change is large: Nairobi,
global conference, environmental. And there are also quotes that you
can see, if you're interested in reading about quotes on climate
change. You know, this is really an infinite thing.The superstars of
climate change in 2006: United States, Britain, China. You know, these
are the towering countries that kind of define this concept. So this is a
piece that demands exploration.This will be online in several days,
probably next Tuesday. And you'll all be able to use it and kind of
explore what your own personal mythology might be. You'll notice that
in Daylife -- rather, in Universe -- it supports both the notion of a
global mythology, which is represented by something as broad as, say,
2007, and also a personal mythology. As you search for the things that
are important to you in your world, and then see what the constellations
of those might look like. So it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much.