A Tale of Two Infographics
The Sunday New York Times had two articles on social media: a Facebook story in the “business” section and a bit about Twitter in the “style” section. Both were accompanied by compelling infographics.
The Facebook graphic, called “The Road to 200 Million,” employs lines and dots to show how people interact with their networks.
The Twitter graphic, titled “Strange Webfellows,” uses a series of lines and celebrity photographs to illustrate random celebrity interconnections in the Twittersphere.
They were each so perfectly geared to their section and audience. The FB graphic didn’t just inform but furthered our understanding of how people in online communities interact. The Twitter graphic entertained more in the vein of a supermarket tabloid than it was informative. It is fun to know, for example, that MC Hammer and Governor Schwarzenegger are following one-another’s tweets but it doesn’t serve to help us understand the world of Twitter, or beyond. They also remind that if we fall too deep into the vortex of these social media webs we might become nothing more than a series of dots and arrows.
Each graphic however evokes visual texture in that they layer incredibly simple visual elements to entertain and inform. They are not your father’s bar graph.
