We are all dots on the map

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Everyday, we exchange gigabytes, terabytes or petabytes of information and our position is continually tracked and shared. From one point of view, we are small wandering dots that draw complex virtual maps.



Eric Fischer, developer of Google, is an active user on Flickr and, from his photostream, is clear his passion for maps. Fischer has collected and analyzed information on geolocalisation included in tweets and images that were uploaded on Flickr by millions of users, and he has created a series of images that make up the project See something or say something. The series of maps takes account of data from 47 major international cities, but there are also details of North America and Europe.

The red dots represent the locations from which images are uploaded to Flickr, the blue ones the places that send tweets and the white ones represent the places where users do both. Fischer’s maps show the world in a new light. Observing them, it can be noted that for the most part are designed in mobility.  In the map of Rome are evident in the south-east direction, the Via Appia Nuova, and in the north-east direction, the Strada die Parchi. The latter drawn from hundreds of tweets. In the map of Copenhagen thousands of tweets paint the Øresund Bridge, the long bridge that connects the city of Copenhagen with Malmö in Sweden.

In the map of Paris, on the other hand, it’s clear the route that takes to the area of the Grand Arche de la Defense, in all probability drawn by several clicks of the tourists visiting the area.

Fischer’s maps are so very well defined, to allow the exercise to superimpose them to satellite maps, to extract different types of information, trying to making hypothesis and conjectures.

I like thinking that every point doesn’t represent just a raw data - a tweet, a photo, a GPS coordinate - but a story, told and shared through information technology: so, maps are a concentrate of stories, painted by the exchange of information and by the movement of each of us anytime.