It is not hard to see why the map plays a large role in the document. It symbolizes the global reach and global ambition of Facebook during its recently-completely IPO. Like Facebook itself, the map relies upon an organizing abstraction ("friendship"), presenting it in the somewhat sterile blue, black, and white form fitting for Zuckerberg's social network.Butler's map, and of course Facebook's successful production of a "social graph," symbolize a larger turn to transparency in social media. Both make visible things that were previously hidden: the extent of global friendship, the connections between friends and Web sites, and the online movements of users across the Web. They are part of a confessional turn in social media, the previously invisible private emotional lives of users made public via Web 2.0. Transparency isn't limited to Facebook, but appears in blogs, Youtube, Flickr, and Twitter. It is difficult to deny that, like it or not, these systems are revealing aspects of human interaction that previously operated on a scale we could not comprehend, we could not visualize. Personal, confessional transparency might be the spirit of the age.
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