TweetPing says it's a real time map of Twitter activity around the world. I don't have any information to the contrary, and it comes with a dashboard that makes you feel like a boss surveilling the planet, so I'll take them at their word.
The data loads (or streams?) too quickly to be able to read much, so the real information is in the accumulated glow of global tweeting hotspots. Surprisingly, even at this hour the eastern half of the United States is blazing away.
But what else is hard not to notice is where there are no blinking lights of technochattiness.
Not to get all Libby Downer on an otherwise cool information display, but The Atlantic Cities has an interesting piece today on the internet reinforcing inequality through data maps. Unlike the hardware- or service-based digital divide that is usually the focus of technological inequality discussions, in this case the concern is that there are some places (actually, some people) who aren't generating local information at the rate of other places. In the spots on the TweetPing map where we see people tweeting, we can also imagine they're taking geotagged photos, writing Yelp reviews, logging traffic data with Waze, adding layer upon layer of data for their region. Some places -and I mean places where people really live, not just empty forests and farmland- don't have much or any of that.
Maybe you don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. Trees still make noise when they fall, even if no one has checked into the forest on Foursquare. Maybe the more valuable reminder is that while the internet with all of its data can often give the impression that we have the world at our finger tips, we're often looking through a lens of largely self-selected data, and we should be mindful of the composition of that lens.
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Best. Screensaver. Ever.
If I could only get it to work out that way.
The cool part is watching as the tweets grow, and the areas glow.
Compare that tweet map to a map of cell phone towers?
So people who live away from the masses prefer not to be connected to twits tweeting? Wow what a revelation! Imagine all those people dropping out and hiding in plain sight. What are they afraid of? Are thet all white supremists keeping a low profile?Maybe they are all gun toting anti-government psycho-paths preparing an overthrow of the USA! Maybe they are throwbacks who still live in some outdated society where people think friends are people you actually know and interact with in real life?
We don't know you because you won't tweet therefore you must be up to something,unlike us tweeters who obviously are not up to anything.
Gosh do I seem a bit sarcastic?GOOD!
You're probably right about that, Paul S. Campbell, and there are definitely desireable features of such a primary society. Homogenous primary communities share values and mores, and are often seen as the bedrock of a stable society. One of the reasons for this view is that they typically sanctify those values and mores, that is, they come to view them as having intrinsic and absolute validity. This means that the general values and mores of a broader society or culture have powerful roots in many small, isolated, primary communities dispersed throughout its environs.
When different cultures, ethnicities, and belief systems encounter each other, values and mores go through a process of change. The stereotypical contrast between big cities and small rural towns is a commonly accepted illustration. Of course, this process of change can be tumultuous. In the "global village" of the 21st century, the confluence of cultures, ethnicities, and belief systems is worldwide. We live in a rapidly changing world, where values and mores are part of that change. This can become a point of considerable tension. Changes in "standard operating procedure" or "the usual way of doing things" are difficult, but can be accomplished. Changes in sanctified values and mores, viewed as embodying absolute truths, is far more difficult, and can lead to violent conflict.
Focusing on the United States, TweetPing's twitter activity map offers digital verification of something we all seem to know and understand. Those areas most in contact with the changing global village are the most urban, the most ethnically and culturally mixed, and the most politically progressive. Areas with little contact with the changing global village are the most politically conservative. These more isolated, homogenous, primary communities cling most vociferously to traditional values and mores because they see them as intrinsically valid and absolute. This builds the strong and traditional primary ties that you value, Paul (and which are satisfying and valuable), but creates tensions between more isolated primary communities and those in greater contact with the changing global village.
Both groups are up to something, quite a lot of something. Our Culture Wars are rooted in these tensions, and the Culture Wars are reflected in our current political turmoil, even to the extent that positions on non-Culture War issues often align themselves along Culture War lines. Big verses small government, austerity versus Keynesian government spending, and views on gun rights, are easily recognized examples. The TweetPing map merely shows another variable that is aligned along Culture War dimensions. This offers some insight into the nature of our Culture Wars and our political divide. That's all that Rachel's post points out.
"The physical world operates independently of the mental world in epiphenomenalism; the mental world exists as a derivative parallel world to the physical world, affected by the physical world ... but not able to have an effect on the physical world."
Just pulled that from the wikipedia article on epiphenomena. Kind of neatly describes the Internet, though you could look at it in a good way ("The Internet is our collective imagination!") or a bad way ("Nothing on the Internet is actually happening, it's all just the fever dreams of a solipsistic hive-mind.") Either way, when you see this map, it's pretty impressive. It's like an fMRI of our collective brain.