When I first thought of what to focus on for my second year of grad school, my thesis, I knew I wanted to visually represent my curiosity and personal vision of how virtual social networks has affected my personal relationships. I wanted to “paint” my Facebook friends as a painter would paint love or pain.
I spent a lot time imagining a metaphor that adequately represented my own unique perspective on the subject. Remember that individual perspective and not data visualization was the goal. I chose the lightning bug to be my metaphor because of my fundamental emotional response I’ve always felt in their presence. The more I thought about the metaphor the more I was satisfied.
Once I started studying social media, synchronicity, and emergence I discovered that lightning bugs were a common theme. Mathematician, Steven Strogatz studied them for their oscillators. Lightning bugs were perfect for my “digital painting.” They had personal meaning, they were beautiful, they synchronized, they communicated over distance, they grew strength in numbers, there were studies that matched my own interest, and they all possessed unique features while still being able to find common traits.



So what I find interesting today, and what spurred this blog post is the chance that I stumbled upon the perfect metaphor. I feel that this is a case of art finding truth be reverse engineering the human mind.
How did I choose it? What lead me to lightening bugs without any prior knowledge of Strogatz’s studies or any knowledge of their biological makeup? Was I just lucky? Is there a reasonable mental connection for why I thought of lightning bugs? Did I hear the comparison before and forgotten it?

-Digital Painting: Social Media