This week we looked at the internet as being ‘glocalised’ – That is that the idea that the internet is both global and local at the same time. The most interesting thing I remember from this lecture is the PacNet mobile internet vans operating in India. I thought that it was a fascinating way to look at the different ways that people can access the web worldwide. For this week’s blog post I’ve decided to analyse the way that I use the internet glocally. To do this I used two Facebook applications to look at my Facebook friend network to show how my network is connected in both a local and global sense.
Friend Wheel
Firstly I used the ‘Friend Wheel’ application to look at the linkages between friends in my network. The application visually displays the linkages between each friend in your Facebook network and this gave me an idea of who-knows-who within my network. What I noticed looking at the friend wheel was that the people on the top end and left side of the wheel showed a lot of friend linkages, and this represented the majority of the wheel. What I also noticed that this section of the wheel is where the friends who lived geographically closest tended to be located, and also where my closest friends (mostly from school) were positioned as well. The section that showed the least amount of friend linkages were friends from smaller friendship networks (such as work and uni friends), acquaintances, and people whom I have met randomly online. To put this more simply, the areas with more friend connections were people I speak to more often (both online and face-to-face) and who live geographically near me. The areas with least friend were people I speak to least, and tended to be people to who lived overseas.
http://thomas-fletcher.com/friendwheel/showwheel.php?site=facebook&tempdir=0&server=alpha&name=Dane%20Cutler&filename=90000645&xmlwheel=1
Map Friends
The second application I used was ‘Map Friends’ which shows the location of friends in your Facebook network according their ‘current location’ profile information. The program collates this information from your friends profile pages and displays this information visually on an interactive GoogleMap. This was quite an interesting application to look at and showed some interesting information. As I assumed, there was a high density of markers along the Eastern Australia coast. Another thing that I noticed was a significant number of people in my network from North America, which I attribute to the Americans and Canadians I met while travelling throughout Europe. There were a few friends located in Africa, people I met while travelling and former work colleagues. I had one friend from school that now Lives in South America, and two friends I met at UOW who are Asian-born international students. Most surprising to me was the number of friends living in Europe, but as I looked closer I noticed that a number were friends from Australia who now are living in Europe for work or study while the rest were random people I had added online but rarely speak to.
I found this application to be less convincing than the previous application tool I used. There are a few things that were distorted by this tool. Firstly that some pins on the map marked many people with the same location while others marked a single person. Secondly, some location were entered incorrectly in friends profile pages and therefore marked incorrectly on the map. Thirdly, it did not show how those people marked on the map were linked to each other.
Facebook: Global or Local?
Watch the clip below to show how the Facebook Network has grown glocally. Notice how certain ‘hotspots’ grow quickly in particular nations while other localities are left behind.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L11F0s4ykW0&feature=related
Conclusion
After using these two applications I have found a bit more about how I used Facebook as a glocal network. I use the Facebook network mainly to keep speak to people who live geographically closest to me, while I use it less often to speak to people who live furthest away. However in saying this I think Facebook is a vital tool in easily keeping in contact with people overseas than other communication methods used in the past.
