I went to the G-20 demonstration today. At first I thought of trying to locate some friends, but I decided against it and instead spontaneously wandered up and down the stream of people, stopping to the most unusual or interesting marchers. This turned out to be good fun. I enjoyed especially the guys with a cycle pulling speakers and a mixing table, with two guitarists and a singer walking alongside, singing anarchist pop songs.
A very diverse group was out, including a range of environmental and development groups and unions. The unions were actually very visible, with large banners and orchestras in uniforms. Unions and environmental groups don’t come together very often. The theme of the march - “Put people first” - was flexible enough to contain the mission of all participants. Put people first, before what exactly? The banks? The climate? I did not stay for the speaches in the end to find out.
Marches are an excellent environments for photographing. The whole point of coming out is being seen (though not necessarily identified), so the typical constraints for pointing a lense at unknown people don’t apply. One endearing old lady was marching holding a fox mask in front of her face, shouting in a rather hushed voice and every now and asking people next to her whether she was making enough noise to be heard. I did not quite catch what her message was but I think it was about animal rights and Mr. Cameron. Every now and then you could see a marvellous smile as she moved her disguise, yet whenever I raised my camera she shyly hid her face. I did snap it in the end, sorry about that..
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This is a picture of the connections between my Facebook friends with each other. It is possible to make them with a Facebook application and some rather unfriendly analytical software.
Graphs are a fascinating form of information. They don’t have a single, unambiguous visual representation. The network could be drawn in endless different ways. The software available has some fancy formulas to group the nodes that have many connections close to each other. It takes a little tinkering, but when you get it right you start to see certain groups forming. These aggregations are not based on any preset classifications, but rather a manifestation of the links between the points - or in this case, people. This is at first slighly confusing, as it requires looking at the labels of the dots (not displayed here) to even come up with an interpretation of what one agglomerate is.
The results are unsuprising. The different different aggregations are mostly based on the different cities I’ve lived in. There are people from Vienna, Oxford, Berlin, and Finland in general with very few connections between them. My acquaintances from Africa create a hexagon, linked only within themselves. The software is able to discern also subgroups within the larger city-based camps. In Helsinki, the swarm of spots on the bottom right corner, it is possible to separate three smaller clusters with some satellites. These are groups of friends from university, from my high school and other people from Lahti. Oxford shows similar distinction between people I know from college and the department. These clusters stand out despite the fact that, within the larger group, everyone is heavily connected with each other. Another neat display are the few links between the larger groups. These actually consist only of people that have happened to move from one locality to another, from friends that have visited me or people whom I’ve happened to know in two of the cities.
One of the early visions about the Internet, still kept alive by some techno-optimists, is a dream of being completely virtual, without limitations of the material or spatial, like a digital spirit without a body. There is little sign of that here. Despite all this social networking, the networks of my friends are still fully place-bound. Our dematerialized society seems to consist of us meticulously recording and keeping track of all the connections we have established, mainly through good old-fashioned sporadic face-to-face meetings. Networking sites don’t encourage us to form new links so much as they help to make a precise copy of the connections formed outside them. The upside of this is that social forms become traceable, calculable. Our communal lives can be followed and drawn up, if only to show that the same old limitations persist.
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