In making my weathermap of feeling, I have struggled to make connections. At first glance, and maybe even with some serious study, it has appeared that little significant conclusions can be drawn. However, the more I think about the assignment, the more connections I am able to make. Lefebvre once said, “The commodity, the market, money, with their implacable logic, seize everyday life. The extension of capitalism goes all the way to the slightest details of everyday life (Lefebvre qtd in Highmore p 117).” It is exactly this connection between Americans and their commodity culture that is apparent in the weathermaps of feeling.
The elements I included in my weathermap comprise of: news headlines, news pictures, stock market standings, weather, moon phase, quotes from wefeelfine, and the number of people happy and sad at the time according to wefeelfine. The real problem with this is that it is not broad enough to encompass the spectrum I needed to back up any trends that seemed to emerge. For example, the stock market, in the eyes Lefebvre (I would assume) would be considered a major effecter of human emotion. However, the people whose emotions I was able to track (mostly young female bloggers) are most likely not the type of people who would be greatly effected by the stock market on a daily basis. Granted, if something major happened, like a stock crashed, I’m sure it would get back to them through their family’s emotions. However, I still believe that a connection does exist here and if studied more properly, could be easily illustrated.
If I was able to somehow expand my study, and report only on the people directly or indirectly affected by each element of commodity culture I believe it would be much easier to show connections. On the other hand, however, it is quite characteristic of everyday life to come up with uncategorizeable and completely mixed bag of results for this is how life truely is. As many of the people we studied chose not to categorize their findings or to put them in a montage sort of fashion, the style of our findings seemed to be very much in sync with theirs.
I spoke with Jennifer, Melissa H., and Kristina about their weathermaps and found that they had reached similar conclusions. They too had great difficulty making connections that weren’t simply an unfounded stretch. As a group we seemed to have reported on many of the same basic things like news, blogs, entertainment, and headlines. It was observed that sad pictures were found most easily as well as happy text, but not visa versa. Also, in looking at blogging, often times most of what was found were teenagers complaining about their life. This, we agreed, was a very limited scope of material to go on in making conclusions.
The four of us went through discussing what we found on one random day. We chose October 28th as a starting point. On this day both Melissa H. and I included a headline from the Red Sox (who had recently won the World Series). I had bias in including it because I am from Boston, but she felt that it was a genuine spark of human emotion. I think this is most likely true, because people tend to respond to sports. Other headlines included by the girls were about the building of a soft car, Gap child labor, Kid Rock not pressing charges, and arrests in China totaling 774 people. All these news headlines we felt were ones that could prompt some kind of human emotion. However, we did struggle to show this because, at the end of each day, it seemed that the happy and sad balanced out leaving a neutral state.
