The Planetary Mood Ring
July 4, 2010 by Bruce Damer
What if there was a central place for all of humanity to text, tweet, email, blog and click in the essence of their mood in the moment? This gigantic feelings aggregator would provide a massive emotional pulse check on the planet that runs continually. Represented as a color wheel inspired by the mood rings of the 1970s, blue and violet would signify people being in cooler, calmer and more satisfied states whilst ambers and reds would represent a civilization in a deep state of angst.
As our collective blip moved around through the hues of this vast digital mood ring, we could track the collective emotional shifts triggered by reports of natural disasters like earthquakes or human made crises like financial meltdowns or celebrity breakups.
Planetary Mood Ring submissions, called “moodies,” could be sorted out by geo-spatial location and show moods of entire countries, cities or towns, highways, your own neighborhood, office or household. People could enrich the whole Planetary Mood Ring by attaching words, videos and photos to their moodies, letting us all into the cause of their current mood. With all of this mood-data in hand the planetary populace (or perhaps just your office cubicle-mates) could attempt to move its collective blip from amber to aquamarine through the application of artistic or spiritual uplifting exercises and begin to push back on the angst-intensifying effect of global media.
Could this help us all to calm down a bit, enter into a state of enhanced presence, thereby allowing us to clear our heads and learn to treat our fellow humans and planet with more care and compassion? This just might work, so I feel it’s worth a try!.
So send us your moodies and let’s see!
comments 7
by lanamaniac
I love this topic so much i started a ning community around it. we already have some amazing discussions going on. Check it out:
http://planetmoodring.ning.com/
My latest topic is:
Here is a cool concept for Planet Moodring. While it is still unclear as to how exactly data will be gathered, its is definitely amazing how it can be used. For instance, since this definitely needs to include geographic mood sensors, we can tell how a certain city is doing.
If we add up all the cities, then apply to average to a country and the to the world, then we can see wether the earth had a good day or a bad day from a human perspective. We can see where there are anomalies or surprises.
I love the notion of that. Forum, what do you think?
by Xartec
Within a couple of hundred years when we merged our bodies and minds into a global self-replicating nano-net we might not need that outer ring; instead the entire surface of the planet could reflect ‘our’ mood. Some day the entire universe might glow red if ‘we’ are mad or just annoyed by the lack of new knowledge. “Can someone please twitter something we don’t know yet?”
by danm50
This could actually be hugely useful. If sufficient mood reports were aggregated, over time, correlations between communal mood and all sorts of social phenomenon could develop to the point where valuable ‘near future’ predictions could be made. Tracking major events effect on communal mood could help tailor all sorts of responses. Tracking communal mood correlation to such things as buying patterns, voting patterns, movement patterns, etc. could really help appropriate responses in place.
The actual ‘correctness’ of the mood reports would, over time, not be particularly relevant as the correlations would be between ’cause’ and ‘reported’ mood and ‘reported’ mood and ‘effect’ .
I would think this would be relatively easy to do if, as mentioned above, the current various social networking sites that have or would add a ‘mood’ reporting facility would allow the aggregation of these reports in real-time so that the fluctuations could start to be correlated with possible/probable ’causes’ and ‘effects’.
by Shiprat
Very interesting. It might help individuals, social cliques and entire nations as well to put their existence into perspective. To see how the world in general might be happy even though your life seems like crap. Also it might force people to see truths they would otherwise ignore. Of course it wouldnt really be perfect until it senses or responds to the mood of every single human on the planet..
Should give a very nice sense of community to.
by futurist
Interesting.
by jabelar
Sounds like this could be done as an application for some of the major social networking sites. In fact, many of them already have a rudimentary mood indicator — just need to convince Facebook or whatever to aggregate the results.
Note though that as a useful tool, you’d have to address that people are not necessarily good at reporting their own mood. Also, there would be some group dynamics that would cause weird feedback — like if everyone was scared I might report that I was scared too.
by bee
But aren’t people actually good at reporting their perception of their own mood, especially if it were anonymous? That may be more important if you also take into account crowd mentality.