REMAPPING OUR WORLDS

How Social Media Have Transformed the Landscape

Social media have remapped the world, pushing beyond all sorts of boundaries — geographic, demographic, and conceptual alike. In this chapter, we look at the new global, social world and the people who inhabit it as background to the upcoming discussion of participation in specific social media platforms from a faith and ministry perspective.

REMAPPING THE WORLD

Even if you happened to be off on a remote, Wi-Fi disabled island vacation in the summer of 2017, by the time you sailed back to reality you would perhaps have caught the news that Facebook had grown to more than two billion monthly users — up dramatically from 750-million-plus users that wowed us when we were writing the first edition. In terms of active users, Facebook eclipses all other social networking communities, with double the number of users of the next most popular platform, Instagram. The continuous growth in Facebook membership and the way in which it has begun to change our view of the world brings to mind the shift in mapmaking in the sixteenth century, after wider global travel and mechanistic, rather than artisan, mapmaking altered the reigning perception of the world.

In the ancient and medieval worlds, a map was less a representation of geopolitical reality than it was an expression of the cultural terrain from the perspective of the mapmaker and his patrons. For example, the famous Hereford Mappa Mundi (or "map of the world") situates Jerusalem in the center, the Garden of Eden at the top (which is east on the map), and a variety of other biblical locales — Noah's ark, the Red Sea, Babylon — along with England, Scotland, and Ireland all out of geographical proportion to Asia. And, of course, medieval mapmakers made sure to indicate the dangerous waters leading to unknown territories where "thar be dragons!"— signaled by detailed illustrations of dragons, sea monsters, and other mythical creatures who stood for those locales we know are somewhere around the bend but whose inhabitants we do not know or understand.

A medieval mappa mundi, then, marked out 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 in relationship to the Divine creator. Medievalist Lisa Deam, author of A World Transformed: Exploring the Spirituality of Medieval Maps (2015), shared with us: "What I get from medieval maps like the Hereford mappa mundi and others is the idea of being grounded morally and spiritually, having a center to anchor us even as the rest of the world is changing."

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. Modern maps also recenter the spiritual terrain that grounded much of premodern experience. Thus, Lisa Deam contrasts the God-centered medieval mapping practice to contemporary geopolitical mapping and social media practice. "Maps today, and I think social media as well," she says, "encourage us to see ourselves as the center — almost literally as something like a GPS unit where the world is always changing in accordance to where we stand. So, we see it changing around us and we're our own reference points."

But Deam is quick to point out that the shift from medieval, God-centered, narrative maps to modern geopolitical maps is not of course all bad — including in spiritual terms:

Maps today have shown us how to break down more boundaries, to think more globally, and engage more globally. That is something new in human history, and that's a good thing. ... It shows us that God is everywhere, not just in our own carefully bounded units — our own churches, our own denominations, our own cherished beliefs, but that God is truly a global god, who created the whole world.

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 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 black areas on the map below are where Facebook is the dominant digital social network. Notably, with the exception of Greenland, where Twitter and icebergs reign, the areas not covered by Facebook are the territories of more repressive regimes in which the networked, relational sharing and cocreating 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 most populous — ahead of China and India, and having more than five times 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...