October 15, 2007
Social Constellations: Telling stories of how we know who we know Diagramming social connections is a trend that most social networking sites use to visualize relationships between individuals. These diagrams often do not serve any real purpose other than represent where these social links happen. Interested in seeing how social links happen, I decided to ask individuals whether they knew any celebrities or knew of anyone who knew them (precisely because of our collective interest in this group). My inbox was flooded with enthusiastic responses that comprised of both extremely personal and outrageously hilarious stories. In devising a system to draw these connections, the form that resulted coincidentally resembled that of constellations - a nice little surprise I suppose. Each individual’s connections are pared down into the form of nodes and links, but the convoluted stories we tell are recorded in verbatim in order to retain the humanistic qualities that perhaps typical social networks do not visualize. I am always collecting these stories, so let me know if you have any! Currently in the form of a poster, this information will be translated into a book. {for graduate thesis studio I}

Social Constellations: Telling stories of how we know who we know
Diagramming social connections is a trend that most social networking sites use to visualize relationships between individuals. These diagrams often do not serve any real purpose other than represent where these social links happen. Interested in seeing how social links happen, I decided to ask individuals whether they knew any celebrities or knew of anyone who knew them (precisely because of our collective interest in this group). My inbox was flooded with enthusiastic responses that comprised of both extremely personal and outrageously hilarious stories. In devising a system to draw these connections, the form that resulted coincidentally resembled that of constellations - a nice little surprise I suppose. Each individual’s connections are pared down into the form of nodes and links, but the convoluted stories we tell are recorded in verbatim in order to retain the humanistic qualities that perhaps typical social networks do not visualize. I am always collecting these stories, so let me know if you have any! Currently in the form of a poster, this information will be translated into a book.

{for graduate thesis studio I}

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