professor

Take 5 minutes to watch the following video.  [If you already know about www.wheresgeorge.com skip ahead to the 2:00 mark.]

The video is more than a curiosity.  For those of us involved in social media and social networking it’s got some interesting implications.

• Our culture is a grouping of relatively defined economic series of affiliation.  The transfer of dollars is a basic indicator of human interaction.
• Those portions of digital social networks that are incorporated into an economic ecosystem can be transferred into physical networks.
• Those portions of digital social networks that are outside of economic ecosystems will have less likelihood of transferring into physical networks.
• Political boundaries influence the creation of economic ecosystems.
• Geographic boundaries influence the creation of economic ecosystems.
• The probability of digital social networks transferring into physical social networks probably has some impact on how people behave within those networks, but I don’t know exactly what it is.

Digital social networks are both expanding and limiting.  They expand our ability to connect and network with other people, but are limited by our inability to share the affective attributes of physical interaction.  It is not precisely social; it’s more a fabrication of the intellect than the experience of the body.

A note:  “Follow the Money” was created by graduate students Christian Thiemann and Daniel Grady at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University to help demonstrate their research under Professor Dirk Brockmann in human mobility networks. It won the 2009 Visualization Challenge sponsored by NSF and the AAAS.

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