facebook and the world

I am presenting a fascinating and visually stunning map which was created by a facebook intern named Paul Butler. He explains how this piece was generated: “I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. “ You can read more on the topic here. The map shows that Russia and China are completely out of FB’s world, so it is most of Africa. In fact, Russia and China use some facebook clones, namely vkontakte.ru and renren, which are character friendly and provide, at least for China, government-friendly censorship of several key terms. Moreover, most of Africa and some parts of the southern American continent are not covered by the internet.

It is impressive that, at least in subsaharan Africa, the map does also illustrate the only countries where an efficient prevention of tumors is available. In fact, the prevention of cancer of the uterine cervix, breast and liver has been started only in South Africa, in Kenya -Tanzania, in Ghana - Nigeria, exactly where facebook lines are present in the map.  It seems fairly obvious that the pattern of diffusion of the internet in Africa (and facebook, as a consequence) reflects a higher level of civilization and a deeper consciousness of social health problems in those countries.