Using social media to track global digital cultures

Tracking and visualising global digital cultures is a mammoth task. Each day millions of pictures and videos are uploaded to, viewed by and shared by people on the internet. The rate at which the content is uploaded and downloaded is unfathomable, especially with the addition of social media where people are able to view and share content from around the web, creating large networks of information.

However, this doesn’t mean that tracking global cultures is impossible. Obviously, with the sheer amount of information on the internet it would be absurd to try and analyse digital cultures by looking at the whole picture. What is needed is a smaller, more easily quantifiable piece of digital pie.
What I suggest here, is that social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter be used in order to track global digital cultures. Data sets would be gathered and tracked from each of these platforms through the use of computer software which would count images uploaded, viewed and subjects, people and things tweeted and shared about.

Because hashtags are now used across all of these programs tracking cultures are made easier than ever before. Quantitative sets of data collected from these websites over time would mean we could analyse online digital cultures as they are today and then over a period of time continue to analyse this data through the systematic gathering of information through hash tags. Trends in social media reflect trends in online cultures.

This could be further advanced by dividing data by the area from which it is gathered, giving an accurate reflection of how cultures work in the online environment. Of course the gathering of this data would be anonymous, with numbers collected instead of names.
This idea would require full cooperation by these social platforms and privacy would have to be considered. But it is a solution like this, or similar which is required in order to help solve the problem of tracking global digital cultures.