New open-access journal article on urban/spatial social media from the Local Content Governance project 🌍📈🌆!
📜 Ballatore, A., Rodgers, S., McLoughlin, L., & Moore, S. (2024). Facebook city: Place-named groups as urban communication infrastructure in Greater London. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science. DOI:10.1177/23998083231224136 [web] [pdf]
Figure 1: Distribution of groups and posting activity in the London boroughs, visualised with geographical maps (a and b) and equal-population cartograms (b and d). Both Facebook variables are scaled by the resident population (per 100,000 people). The number of posts represent the activity in the last month at the time of data collection. Bins are defined with Jenks. Geometry source: House of Commons Library (2022).
Abstract. This paper investigates the geography of Facebook use at an urban-regional scale, focussing on place-named groups, meaning various interest groups with names relating to places such as towns, neighbourhoods, or points of interest. Conceptualising Facebook as a digital infrastructure – that is, the platform’s urban footprint, in the form of its place-named groups, rather than what individuals share and create using the service – we explore the location, theme, and scale of 3016 groups relating to places in Greater London. Firstly, we address the quantitative and qualitative methodological challenges that we faced to identify the groups and ground them geographically. Secondly, we analyse the scale of the toponyms in the group names, which are predominantly linked to London’s suburbs. Thirdly, we study the spatial distribution of groups, both overall and by specific types, in relation to the socio-demographic characteristics of residents at the borough level. Through correlation and robust regression analyses, the presence and activity of groups are linked to a relatively older, non-deprived, and non-immigrant population living in less dense areas, with high variability across different group types. These results portray place-named Facebook groups as communication infrastructure skewed towards more banal interactions and places in Greater London’s outlying boroughs. This research is among the first to explore and visualise the urban geographies of Facebook groups at a metropolitan scale, showing the extent, nature, and locational tendencies of large-scale social media use as increasingly ordinary aspects of how people come to know, experience, live, and work in cities.
Cultural Geo-Analytics Lab 