Weather map of Feelings
Life’s a funny thing. It happens all around us, and no matter who you ask, most likely you will not fine two of the same perspectives on the world. I think that is what this project proved. Although it seemed a little unclear and imprecise at first, when the final picture, or “weather map” was composed, what I found was remarkable. We were assigned to collect news stories from that day, morning and night, from all different sources, in order to gain a wide range of what was going on in the world. Now, if it were up to me, these news stories would be all about global warming, melting polar ice caps, endangered species, the Red Sox winning the world series and Hilary Clinton kicking butt in preliminary polling. However, this would be very narrow minded of me, for I would not be presenting what was really going on, but only what I cared about that was going on. Unfortunately though this happens all to many times, where the news allows its biased to be passed on the the niave news readers.
While creating my weather map, I discovered certain patterns in my reasearch. A lot of what I found was politics, mostly because of the upcoming election, but there always seems to be poltics everywhere, because someone always seems to be doing something wrong. There were always sports involved also, because it is always some type of sports season, whether it be baseball or football or basketball or hockey. There were also a lot of world news that were major stories, such as the wildfires in California, or Oprah’s school scandal, convictions of high-profile criminals, political scandals, and so on. I am not really sure how this data collection worked towards these patterns, other than that they seemed to be everywhere I searched, not matter where I went to gather news stories. These certain topics seemed almost unavoidable, and I do not know if it is because this is what the writers want us to know about, or if it is truly what we want to know about.
In order to get a better idea of patterns that developed, or did not develop, among this data collection, we were asked to compare out “weather maps” to those of others. I compared mine with Andrew Overton, and not so much to my surprise, his was very different from my own. First, just by looking at the way the two were set up, immediate differences can be noticed. I wanted to make mine sporadic, with lots of pictures and only catchy words and phrases, manipulating them to fit the expressions within the pictures, putting little writing and leaving great room for the viewers interpretation. While there was some bias in my selection of news articles, I tried to pick random pictures and articles, drawing out words from them that struck me, pictures that meant something or that could arouse some type of feelings for someone looking at my weather map. Andrew, on the other hand, took a very different approach. His was very simple in its layout, with the dates piled neatly on top of each other, each scroll over displaying a similar layout for each date. Unlike my own, which mainly focused on news articles, his main focus was on blogs, people’s own personal feelings, even putting in his own opinions and feelings of the day, some even depending on his current location. For instance, he was at Notre Dame on weekend, so therefore there were a lot of focus on Nortre Dame. His weath map contained more writing and less pictures than did my own, with paragraphs and quotes from people’s blogs, his own personal feelings from that day, own personal events, and so on.
Andrew’s approach to gathering data was also much different from mine. While I tried to find more news articles from places such as the New York Times, Boston Globe, CNN, and so on, he specifically searched for happy and sad by typing them into google news and searching for stories that he liked from that day. He also searched for pics on sites such as flickr and we feel fine to display this happy and sad feeling. One thing I liked about his approach was not only did he display things that most human beings would find as sad, such as the wildfires in California, the death of an actor, happenings in Darfur, and so on, he also included news stories that made him sad because they were news stories, such as stories about Brittney and Kevin Fed, which he considered “stupid news” when really there are much more important things that should be in the news and that we should care about more than celebrity screw-ups that have no effect on the world at large or our own personal lives.
While it may be hard to see how patterns can be made out of these two very different weather maps and approaches, indeed certain patterns can be drawn. Although my weather map contained more news stories and his contained more blogs and personal feelings, two very different weather map aspects, in essence they were the same in their foundations. It seems that no matter where you go for your news source, whether it be a website or a blog, a newspaper or a magazine, it seems we cannot escape certain topics such as politics, sports, and tradedy. These can take all different kinds of forms. For example, politics in the news may be who is winning the presidential campaign, what horrible policy Bush is trying to implement or great one he has shot down, what scandal has erupted in the White House, one may wonder how politics can really be involved in blogs. Well, they can and are. Politics in blogs, however, may take a slightly different form. Politics in blogs can be a woman expressing her feelings of inequality she may have experienced towards a man, the politics of equal treatment, or they may be a school election in which someone was running for student council. Sports in teh news is who won the World Series, which football team is undefeated, who is taking steriods, who is being drafted, while sports in blogs can be a local team, or even competition over who will win the girl or boy, who is playing the game correctly, team rivalries among families, or even a child feeling neglected becuase their father would rather watch the football game rather than play outside. Tradedy is an easy pattern to see wherever we go. Wherever there is a winner, there is always a loser. It is hard to open up a newspaper, go on a news site, read a magazine, blink an eye without seeing some type of tragedy occurring. Why? Because tragedy makes for good news. Everyone seems to like to read about other people’s hardships, or to report about them. I do not think this is necessarily a bad thing, because it can help people to feel normal, or like they are not alone. Tradegy is everywhere, whether it be the wildfires that are raging in California, destroying homes and wildlife, or global warming destroying the environment and pushing species to extinction, or war, sending young men and women overseas to fight a battle that is not ours to fight, or even our own personal tragedies, losing a loved one, not making the team, breaking up, crashing, getting hurt, feeling alone and depressed, tired, weak. Tragedy cannot be avoided, and is part of the pattern of life, for you can only know true happiness if you have felt true defeat, true sadness.
I guess now I see where the happy/sad aspect of this weather map comes into play. You cannot have the happy without the sad, and vice versa, becuase there would be no such thing as happiness if there were no such thing as sadness. There also always seems to be some political aspect to everything, someone battling over something, something not being done correctly. For example, while the wild fires are devastating, there is also the question of is the government doing enough to solve this? Should they have prevented this? Global warming is destroying the environment, should focus not be placed on this so this natural disasters can be stopped? There always seems to be some poltiical aspect to everything, which makes it all drawn together.
Through doing this, I discovered that there are so many different ways to look at things, to interpret things, to gather data, that the possibilities are endless. Everyone has their own unique view of every circumstance, of every occurence, of the world itself. No one’s perspective can be wrong, for it if how one views the world, their world. Although very distinct, they all seem to have one thing in common: they provoke feelings, whether it be of happiness or sadness, of pity or remorse, stirring feelings of wanting to make a change or feeling helpless. All of this data is out there because whether we like it or not, someone cares, and they all seem to affect our lives in some way, whether it be because a sports game or presidential conference prevents us from watching a certain show on television, or if steriod use creates a bias for those we know who are aspiring athletes, or a celebrity break-up makes us question our own relationships, someone somewhere is affected by these stories, whether in an insignificant or in a huge way, for they would not be out there if they were not. What we have to then consider is what should be important, where we should gather our data from, how much bias we should put towards our data collection and how much bias we must realize is out there, and even getting our there ourselves to get the real story. We cannot allow these simple typed words to control our view of the world, for it is someone else’s view that we may be reading about. Just like the weather itself, while the patterns of percipitation and sunshine may vary from day to day, so do our lives, where one day may be bright and sunny and another day a storm cloud may be hanging over our heads. This is the climate of life, and we cannot avoid it, but we must accept that our own views our not the only ones, and we must be open to climate change.
