LITMIR.BIZ

      A medieval mappa mundi, then, marked not national boundaries or natural terrains, but rather spiritual and psychosocial ones—worldviews, we would call them today. They told stories about how people imagined the world and themselves in it.

      While we’ve come to make maps with greater geographical accuracy, we fool ourselves still if we believe that our modern maps reflect any uncomplicated, uncontroversial reality. This is because the nations and the borders we now recognize through the boundaries drawn on modern maps are political ideas rather than geographical facts, the results of negotiated histories and relationships. Ask the people of Tibet where China really is (or vice versa), and you’ll come into a swirl of contested history, tradition, and politics. As the saying goes, what you see really does depend on where you stand. Likewise, of course, the lines of longitude and latitude found on some maps don’t exist in any physical form. They merely mark a system of vertical and horizontal coordinates used to identify the precise location of any area on the earth for the purposes of navigation and geographical identification.

      Though it may be the case that it is far easier to navigate across the globe with a modern, geopolitical map, it is no less the case that such maps also chart a modern worldview, which assumes the idea of separate nation-states and global navigation along gridlines that make the globe into manageable quadrants. Indeed, most modern maps make the assumption that few of us will travel by foot or otherwise on the ground, generally eliminating the challenges of mountains, lakes, and rivers as other than properties of this nation or that state.

      This is no less true in maps of the evolving digital world, where social networking sites have allowed people to cross all sorts of boundaries, setting aside traditional and/or political notions of nation, ethnicity, class, ideology, and so on—including religion. Hence China’s tight control of social networking participation that could—would likely, if we read the 2011 revolution in Egypt through this lens—introduce ideas into the culture that might challenge or override the official narrative. While China holds a remarkable advantage in terms of global capital and geographically located population, a new mapping of the world that highlights the population of just the Facebook social networking community tells a very different story.

      The dark areas on the map below are where Facebook is the dominant digital social network. Outside of Brazil, where Google’s Orkut social network dominates, the areas not covered by Facebook are often the territories of more repressive regimes in which the networked, relational, sharing and co-creating of new knowledge is seen by government leaders as a threat.The remarkable fact is that if the population of people who participate on Facebook across the globe were a nation, that country would be the third most populous—just behind China and India, and having more than twice the population of the United States. What’s more, if territory where Facebook dominates were ceded to this new digital nation, it would have as much land mass as North and South America combined, with Africa thrown in for good measure, making it the largest continental territory in the world.²