The UrbanTick blog has been collecting Twitter data in order to map the social networking ecology of major cities. The detailed maps treat the number of Tweets as topography, with the epicenters of activity renamed as hills and ridges. The above depiction of New York City has some interesting epicenters, which curiously place Central Park in a trough between the high university traffic at Columbia and NYU. I’m encouraged by the inference that when we go outside to commune with nature we disconnect from our digital tethers.
We can certainly expect similar mapping of social interaction now that Twitter and other social networking come equipped with geolocation.
