Looking at BIG Data: What Social Media Can Tell Us About Ourselves

Big data, like the name says, are, well, BIG. The term is loosely used to refer to any number of data sets that by their very nature are so large as to make them extremely difficult to analyze and to understand. More and more, Big Data includes they types of things we culturally have come to share on places like Facebook and other social media. Recently the New York Times looked at one Big Data set and came up with a sort of interesting map I wanted to share.

There are few things we think of as truly American, but the short list includes motherhood, apple pie, and of course baseball. The dividing lines between various parts of the country as being Yankee fans, or Red Sox fans, for example, have long been debated. Using social media "likes" and the public preferences expressed on Facebook, the NYT came up with the following map showing the country's favorite baseball teams attributed by zip code.

Click to Enlarge

They also have an interactive map where you can pull down to your local area and click on a zip code to see the top 3 teams favored in that area. Here's what the 13501 area shows us in terms of team loyalty.

While the support of our national pastime is sort of interesting to look at, think about it more in terms of what other things social media's Big Data might say about you, your spending habits, and your other allegiances!

Social Networking and Internet Use Differences Among White, Black, and Hispanic Users

Back in August of 2013 I posted about a PEW study measuring adult use of the internet. Well recently the Wall Street Journal released a study of how Twitter is attempting to better aim it's ads based on the demographics of its users. As it turns out Twitter's user base is more racially diverse than U.S. Internet users as a whole. Blacks, Hispanics and Asian users account for 41% of Twitter's 54 million U.S. users, compared with 34% of the users of rival Facebook and 33% of all U.S. Internet users, according to Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project.

The graphic below allows some comparisons between the various prominent social media and their user demographics.