I ran across the work of Larson + Shindelman a while ago and was so impressed with it. It is really clever in its treatment of our current state of communication.
Geolocation: Tributes to the Data Stream was created in 2009.
In their words...
"Each morning we follow strangers through their Twitter updates, becoming intimately involved in their banal daily errands. We imagine ourselves as virtual flâneurs, exploring cities 140 characters at a time through the lives of others. Sometimes we follow these strangers for a day and other times for months, following the ups and downs of their posts to this public venue.
Using publicly available embedded geotag information in Twitter updates, we track the locations of users through their GPS coordinates and make a photograph to mark the location in the real world. Each of these photographs is taken on the site of the update and paired with the originating text.
We think of these photographs as historical monuments to small lived moments, selecting texts that reveal something about the personal nature of the users' lives or the national climate of the United States. It is also grounds the virtual reality of social networking data streams in their originating locations in the physical world while examining how the nature of one's physical space may influence online presence."
You can read more about their work HERE.
Geolocation: Tributes to the Data Stream was created in 2009. In their words...
"Each morning we follow strangers through their Twitter updates, becoming intimately involved in their banal daily errands. We imagine ourselves as virtual flâneurs, exploring cities 140 characters at a time through the lives of others. Sometimes we follow these strangers for a day and other times for months, following the ups and downs of their posts to this public venue.
Using publicly available embedded geotag information in Twitter updates, we track the locations of users through their GPS coordinates and make a photograph to mark the location in the real world. Each of these photographs is taken on the site of the update and paired with the originating text.
We think of these photographs as historical monuments to small lived moments, selecting texts that reveal something about the personal nature of the users' lives or the national climate of the United States. It is also grounds the virtual reality of social networking data streams in their originating locations in the physical world while examining how the nature of one's physical space may influence online presence."
You can read more about their work HERE.