One of the unfortunate truisms of the “big data” era is how much of the world is absent from the vast data archives that increasingly control our digital destinies. While we can follow along as everyday residents in downtown Manhattan live stream their breakfasts, on the other side of the world even major events like wars and natural disasters garner little attention. Most dangerously, the siren song of GPS-tagged social media has led us to artificially narrow our focus to the parts of the world offering the richest geographic insights, further increasing the divide between those whose voices are heard online and those who appear merely as empty space on our “big data” maps.
One of the most striking aspects of the story the animation below tells of Twitter’s geotagged evolution is just how little it has changed over the last seven years.
Even when looking at the totality of all those geotagged tweets, the image is at once mesmerizing in the way it traces transportation corridors and human mobility and strikingly sparse. So much of the world is missing from this map. Even within the United States, much of the western half of the country is absent.
Given that this map shows every location from which even a single isolated tweet was sent over all seven years, it is likely that if the map was limited to only places with regular daily tweeting, it would be even sparser.
Despite their sparsity, these images do bear a remarkable resemblance to the NASA Night Lights imagery of global electrification. The 2016 image is particularly well aligned with Twitter’s 2012-2018 portrait.
This reminds us that Twitter is limited by a need for electricity and internet access. In a correlate to my 2012 remark that “where there is power there is Twitter,” it is also true that “there must be power for there to be Twitter.” This means that Twitter use will necessarily gravitate towards urban cores, while much of the world’s rural countryside will be blank.
Social media skews our understanding of the world towards the same urban voices that have always dominated the global discourse. The rural citizenry for whom social media was supposed to finally empower with a voice is left just as voiceless as before. In fact, rural citizens may be even more disenfranchised than ever as governments increasingly turn to social media to engage with and hear from their citizens.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The map below of locations mentioned in global online news coverage 2015-2018 reminds us of all the places humans live and care about. The media isn’t limited by the presence of electricity or internet access. Journalists find a way each day to capture local voices and events and relay them to the world, even from the most remote corners of the earth.
Putting this all together, it is all too easy to become so mesmerized by Twitter’s ability to trace our urban transit corridors in such exquisite detail that we lose track of the fact that much of the rest of the world is blank. In short, all of the light from those Twitter-saturated urban areas masks the digital darkness that is the rest of the planet. In contrast, the rich vibrant coverage of global journalism reminds us how much of the world we miss through social media and in particular that social’s greatest strength in relying on internet-connected mobile devices is also its greatest weakness.
In the end, whether Twitter’s blindness to much of the world matters depends on the questions we ask of it. To a major Western consumer brand looking to interact with its urban customers in the US, it matters little that the entire continent of Africa is largely missing. To those whose voices are absent from our richly detailed maps, those blank spaces mean they are deprived of a seat at the table of global discourse. For social media and “big data” to reach its fullest potential, we must find a way of addressing how much of the world we miss even as hear from the same places as before, even more.
