I was struck just now by the myspace/social software map I just saw…

as rupert murdoch attempts to overtake dow jones inc. for 5 billion,

as free-market ideology becomes the synonmous with freedom and a sort of utopian fantasy of hyperindividualization, as digg nation becomes synonomous with protection of community of nerds and hackers, as money=time=enclosing space, I couldn’t help but note that in the Myspace Map, it seems to me, the freemarket social software zones are bordered, frightening, perhaps more medieval in their style. Some might be inclined to link it’s aesthetic to Middle Earth or Dungeons and Dragons, a dangerous forbidden zone bordered by defined “nations”.

Thomas More’s utopia map of the 1516

More’s Utopia, as the quote notes, is bordered as well, but homogenous. The dangerous seas are somehow much less inviting than the castles and towns, the Haussmann-like inner ring directing traffic to the centralized zones of power. Is utopia combined and unevenly developed, like Myspace map? It seems not, in fact, to be medieval, but somehow more evenly laid out, protected but open via its channels, inhabited but isolated, alone but shared. We see the “nations,” but nature forms their borders.

It seems to me that the critical defining characteristic of the two maps is scale.

The first map, following social software’s sophmoric (grade school?) tendency towards popularity as determining factor of success, notes that each nation-state size is defined by “estimated number of users”. This is of course consistent with the general notion of the attention economy: freemarket power being generated by ad revenue, ad revenue being an indicator of power, power being = users’ time spent (unique visitors and unique page views).

The second, More’s map, shows a land of possibility, where scale is difficult to determine (the ship being an sign of mercantile narrative-force, personilzing the story for the reader). But we do know that the inner ring, surrounded by water, holds the most structures, and that symmetry (symbolic, perhaps, of order) seems to predominate the island.
The wild, freemarket medieval map seems to pale in comparison with more’s dreams. Perhaps the social freeforall should be reconsidered…