Mapping the
Facebook Network
Image from: Gigaom.com
Facebook
Map 2010
This week as been all about maps. Maps of the real and virtual
world. In general maps are places that are linked up to form a geographical
network. Facebook can be seen as a virtual map as its location services, if you
choose to enable it, links your posts to your location as well as tagging your
friends link them to the post.
A single post can link many people to a single place. So in
a sense it can be seen in a map in that way. Of course this would be a really
inefficient way of mapping the world and if a geographical map were to be drawn
using information such as location of posts then the size of the countries
would be distorted much like the Mercator projection (Wood, 2006). This would
be due to the disproportion of amount of Facebook users to the size of the
country. As of May 2014, India had more than 30 million Facebook users than
Brazil (Statista, 2014). See now if this were mapped according to amount of
users Brazil would be a smaller country than India, which we know to be untrue.
Maps are powerful, mainly because we believe them to be
representations of reality (Kuttainen, 2015). Therefore, these maps need to be
inclusive of all participants. Like I mentioned earlier, the link between the
users on Facebook and their place on the world is the locations services; if
that were to be disabled then that user, in perspective to this map, would
simply vanish of the face of the Earth. Therefore, the maps that are drawn
using Facebook participants would not represent reality and would be totally
disproportioned. Thankfully people took the time nd effort to use their eyes
and chart real maps.
References
Kuttainen, V. (2015). BA1002: Our Space: Networks, narratives and the making of place,
Lecture 2: Power. [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.edu.au
Statista. (2014,
May). Countries with the most Facebook users as of May 2014. Retrieved
from http://www.statista.com/
Wood, D. et al. (2006). Seeing Through Maps: Many Ways to See the
World.Oxford, UK: New Internationalist Publications.
Image Credits
Ingram, M. (2010) Gigaom, Facebook Draws a Map of the Connected World.
It is true that maps are powerful and are made up to be representations of reality, however each person has their own version of reality and that is made up of personal experiences. What I find interesting is that because we are all so unique we have different paths to the same destination, as Dr. Kattainen said in the lecture “maps are both mirrors and shapes of the world”. It is also a scary thing knowing that possibly at any moment we may vanish from the virtual map, I say that because we rely on it so much for everyday use but like you said lucky enough we are able to use the ”old school” form of mapping haha.
ReplyDeleteIn hindsight I’d have to say this week has been all about flaneurs rather than maps, but maps are fun and flaneurs are boring. They’re just people with nowhere to be. I agree with what you’re saying about how if we used Facebook for maps, people would wrongly think India is bigger than Brazil, but I think that maybe it could be said that India IS bigger than Brazil. Not in terms of physical size but in terms of people. While Brazil is large, its population is only 202,033,670 whereas India is one of the most populated countries on the planet with a population of 1,267,401,849 (World Bank 2014). Still, you could also judge the countries on GDP where Brazil is actually bigger than India (though not by that much).
ReplyDeleteReferences
The World Bank. (2014). Total Population (in number of people). Retrieved from http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL
I think it is very interesting how social media is mapped using population, as opposed to geographically. Prouty (2009) described the use of maps by saying "To show truth you have to distort another" (p. 8), meaning if somebody was interested in finding a countries population or time spent on Facebook it would have to exclude the geographical size of the country as it may not be relevant. It's is funny how most of Europe and Asia are almost non existent on your map of Facebook populations, we all know that they are not small countries geographically or population wise. It just so happens that the people in those countries are not very active users of Facebook. If we remember that Prouty (2009) said "A maps quality is related to it's purpose" we have to say that the map in your blog is accurate, despite the fact a large portion of land is missing, as it's purpose is to just show the areas that use Facebook.
ReplyDeleteReference
Prouty, R. (2009). Turtle on a leash. Retrieved from http://www.onewaystreet.typepad.com/one_way_street/2009/10/a-turtle-on-a-leash.html