Week 10: Who is using Facebook around the World?

The phenomenon is one difficult to comprehend, for its ever-increasing popularity is something never before seen in the world of social media. The trend of Facebook can be further understood through viewing data of it's use around the world.


It is for this reason that my visualization group have chosen to present data on this topic to the class. Facebook is a relevant topic in our course, as social medium is a highly popular form of media in contemporary society. We researched many statistics on the use of Facebook within several countries, and broke this down to two main sites which are recent and reliable sources. These were:

http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/?interval=last-week#chart-intervals

http://www.geohive.com/earth/population1.aspx

Our visualization (that is, making our 'invisible' data into something visible') consists of different sized and coloured circles which form a particular order. These circles represent several things. Firstly, each circle is given a different colour. This is to give each country its own identity, and allows one to follow the order easily with their eyes. Next, the circles range in size. This size represents the overall population of the country. For example, the United States circle is much larger than the others, as there are over 300 million residents living here. Finally, the order of the of the circles ranks the countries in order of which has the highest percentage of Facebook users in regards to their population size. For instance, Canada is positioned first, as 53.5% of their country uses Facebook; a percentage higher than any other country in the world.


Our visualization represents the top 20 countries of Facebook users around the world. This particular visualization is effective because of the fact that it contains several types of data within the one image, and therefore clearly and effectively answers the question of who uses Facebook around the world. A way of making this visualization more effective would be to perhaps include more than the top 20 countries, to give viewers a ranger set of data. 


References:


Unknown. (2011). Facebook statistics by country. Available: http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/?interval=last-week#chart-intervals. Last accessed 13th May 2011.


Unknown. (2011). Current world population (ranked). Available: http://www.geohive.com/earth/population1.aspx. Last accessed 13th May 2011.
  

Week 9: The Visual, the Body and the Social Body

This form of visualization is used to explain and debate certain scientific findings. Scientists are frequently seen to be using modes of visualization in order to communicate their research and findings to the public, or to try and get a point across. This can be done through graphs, diagrams, physical sculptures or even just pictures. One of the readings which can be found here http://www.metro.co.uk/news/147937-struggling-polar-bears-put-on-endangered-list is an article about how the US government has recently put polar bears on the endangered species list, as a result of global warming, and how environmentalists are angry that no action is being taken to "tackle climate change".


The image and form of visualization in this article is the picture positioned below the title. This photo depicts a polar bear struggling to stay a hold an ice berg, which is has been melted severely and is now surrounded by water.

 It is explained in the caption that images of these polar bears are commonly being used on posters to represent climate change. This image relates to the process and event of climate change in the way that it shows the immediate effect that this issue is having on animals in the environment, and the suffering which is occurring as a result.

The effect of this being published is that it allows for people to view the issue with their own eyes rather than just hear/read about it, which enables them to form a personal connection with the issue. The visualization can also result in individuals feeling quite sorry for the endangered species. This particular visualization therefore functions to accompany the article and affect the public and will hopefully assist in more support towards overcoming this issue. Therefore, I find this to be quite an effective form of visualization. When first viewing it myself, I definitely held sympathy for these animals and wanted to read more about the scientific findings how I can possibly help.

References:

Unknown. (2011). Struggling polar bears put on endangered list.Available: http://www.metro.co.uk/news/147937-struggling-polar-bears-put-on-endangered-list. Last accessed 5/5/2011

Week 8: Visualization

This week we learnt about the concept of visualization. This is a process whereby an invisible practice is made visible through visual creations. A simple example of this would be taking a set of data, such as the current fertility rate among Australians; and making this into a visual graph to represent the data.

This concept can be rather hard to comprehend at times, as it is difficult to know what types of data can be effectively communicated through visualizations. Can anything invisible be represented through graphs or other visual forms? Or are the choices quite limited?

One reading from this week which I found helpful was the website about 'information aesthetics' which can be found here http://infosthetics.com/. This gave me an idea of the types of 'invisible' concepts which can be converted into something visual, such as into any type of graph. Examples of data include depictions of the London underground, the history of poverty, or the impact of nuclear radiation. This gave me a clearer idea of the way in which almost anything can be transformed into data, as long as a suitable type of graph is used to represent it.

Limits of the visualization project may be that much more complicated data may be too difficult to represent through something as simple as a graph. An example of this might be  the way in which Facebook has overtaken Myspace. This data may need to represent the amount of users for each site, the decrease in popularity of Myspace over a number of years, the present purpose of Myspace etc; and this may be difficult to represent through a graph as it includes several pieces of data within the one idea.

Our visualization group of assessments will give us a better idea of how successful these graphs can be in representing data. We will have to wait and see...

References:
Unknown. (2010). information aesthetics. Available: http://infosthetics.com/?limit=20&offset=20. Last accessed 21 April 2010

Week 7: Wikileaks

This week my team was given the task of debating the argument that Wikileaks is acting responsibly through their work. I had do to much background research on the topic, as I didn't now much about Wikileaks at all. When issues surrounding Wikileaks came onto the news I tended to ignore them, because I  did not see what all the fuss was all about.

After some research, I realised the large impact which Wikileaks was having on society. I now think that the question of whether they are acting responsibly or not is way too hard to conclude, as their are both positive and negative aspects about what they are doing.

Wikileaks is all about freedom, speech, and equality; which reflects the values among many societies. They strive to achieve this by informing citizens about news which Governments intend to wrongly hide from them. Wikileaks holds the power of exposure on governments, corporations and individuals. This forces these players to abide by established rules, follow guidelines, and act in a proper manner.

So, ultimately, Wikileaks enforces responsible governing and decision making, reflecting the responsible nature of the site itself. Bradley Manning, a US soldier who was arrested for leaking information to Wikileaks correctly stated that "without information you cannot make informed decisions as a public".

Though in saying this, I think that it all comes down to trust. The fact of is, if the work of Governments and corporations can not be kept secret and therefore kept safe, then how do citizens of the Government expect to be kept safe? In an article written by public relations worker Paul Seaman, he states that "at the end of the day, society has more right to keep its secrets secret, than does Wikileaks have a right to wreak havoc, and keep its sources hidden while doing so".

So, the question still stands... is Wikileaks acting responsibly?

References

• P.Seaman. 2010. 21st Century PR Issues. [ONLINE] Available at: http://paulseaman.eu/2010/12/why-wikileaks-is-bad-news/. [Accessed 13 April 11].
• B.Ackerman. 2010. CIF America . [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/apr/11/bradley-manning-julian-assange. [Accessed 13 April 11].

Week 6: Attention

In my view, attention relates to interacting an engaging with almost anything; Whether it be a person, a book, a television show, and so on. One thing that holds a huge amount of attention is the internet. One of the readings for this week was an article by Michael H.Goldhaber, titled "Attention Shoppers!" This explores what Michael explains as the "flowing" of attention through cyberspace.

This article explains the concept of information technology, where people use their 'scarce' resources and trade among each other. Michael believes that this definition can no longer state, as a result of the internet. This is because the internet has endless information within it, which can no longer be described as scarce. This overload of information has resulted in the economy of attention becoming "the natural economy of cyberspace", as stated by Michael.

An interesting point Michael makes is that "attention has its own behavior, its own dynamics, its own consequences". This is due to the fact that it has created its own economy, separate from the others among society. Attention is something which can only be created in the mind, rather than through mediums such as "electronic devices". 

This economy of attention is important because it achieves many purposes among humans. Something as simple as reading a map to find your way to a place is an example of attention, which achieves an aim. It can help us in our daily lives. Attention can also refer to the kind which is aimed towards oneself, such as an individual who is praised with attention after achieving something impressive, like winning an award.

This article made me aware of the vast concept of attention, and how it it can is a huge part of our lives, even if we don't always realise that we are applying attention. This so called economy on the internet is one which dominates many others, such as the food economy, for the amount of information brought to our attention is never scarce.

Thanks for reading!

Sources: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.12/es_attention.html

Week 5: Archives

This week, I have considered three main questions;
What are archives?
How are they important in society?
What effects do archives have both socially and individually?

One of my favourite ways of finding something out quickly and effectively is through dictionary.com. Here I was given the definition of archive to be "any extensive record or collection of data". Pretty straight forward. A simple example of an archive which I found to be quite clever, is seen in this week's lecture. The lecturer describes a sea sponge as being an archive, in the way that it absorbs information, and releases content/expression when you squeeze it.

I soon realised, however, that archives can also be quite a complicated matter. For starters, they often hold authority in the way that they can lay the basis for rules. An instance of this is government institutional records, which hold importance in maintaining society. They are therefore important to society in the way that they create order and stability among the community. They also hold laws which can be recorded, preserved or destroyed.

Archives can exist in many different forms, for anything that holds some form of memory can be considered an archive. This includes books, websites, phones, legal documents and so on. All of these mediums can hold and distribute information or memory. It is for this reason that archives are also seen as “the basis for individual memory” (stated in this week’s lecture). To me this means that the mediums with which we as individuals store information, allows us to hold memory which we can distribute or regain at anytime. I’m not sure how precise my evaluation of this concept is, as I am still trying to understand it... but those are my thoughts for now.

Source: http://www.lindseykennedy.com/archives.asp

Source:


http://www.mclibrary.duke.edu/training/mobiledevices/apple

Week 4: Actor Network Theory

For this week's topic, it took me a while to grasp the concept of the Actor Network Theory (ANT). From what I've read, I think it refers to the realtionship between things (be it anything) and the way in which things come together to serve a purpose as a whole. I found YouTube really helpful in explaining this concept further to me, so this week's blog will consist of a video on the Actor Network Theory. I thought it was clever, simple and effective in teaching people of this concept... Enjoy!

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2YYxS6D-mI