What Will We Learn From Emerging Maps of Social Networks?

Back in the heady days of the mid 1990s, when we were first starting to understand the linkages between the online world of the Web and the offline world of offices, homes, school, stores and entire cities, a number of scholars started trying to create maps of Internet infrastructure and the flows of data it carried. Martin Dodge, then at University College London's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, and now at the University of Manchester, compiled the best collection of these early maps at his Atlas of Cyberspace, now archived.

It seems that we're entering a similar phase of interest in the mapping of online social networks. Technology Review has published a gallery of the state of the art of social network graphs. What's interesting is that they are still largely non-geographic. If you look back at Dodge's Atlas you'll see this was the case with early web and Internet maps too. Only over time, as use diffused and techniques for geo-locating activity were developed, did we see maps of networks get embedded into geographic maps of the real world. Expect to see this soon as geo-data is harvested in these studies of the social web.

Those maps are going to raise a lot more questions than they answer though. A key assumption among a lot of the Silicon Valley crowd is that social networks transcend geography. Yet as people like Keith Hampton at MIT have shown, there's also a tremendous amount of new local, weak social ties growing on top of the Internet. Social theorists like to call these simultaneous, diverging trends "glocalization".

A good place to look for an early view of these maps is the New York Talk Exchange exhibit going on at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Based on AT&T IP network data analyzed and visualized by MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory, these images offer a glimpse into the grand-daddy of online social networks - the international telephone system. Glocalization indeed, as the maps illuminate clusters of calls from tightly-knit immigrant communities in Queens reaching across the globe to their homelands.

Look at the gallery in Technology Review: Between Friends

Technorati Tags: New York City, geography, social networks

Comments

[nicolas]

This reminds me something Stephen Graham described last week at the Mobile City conference in Rotterdam.

His point was that technologies (such as the Internet or ubicomp) tend to become hidden and disappear but then re-appear when they break. The recent breakdown of two undersea cables in the Mediterranean sea made lots of people conscious of the existence of these infrastructures. As he said, we started to see maps of internet cables in the media.

Of course, it's less about traffic, rather about infrastructures but it's interesting to see these things like this re-appear. I am personally fascinated by things that break and the implications flaws or breakdown may have for the perception (and then the usage) of technologies.