Mapping the social landscape through social media

Being a habitat of the global village, every place has established connections through the strength and power of social media, piercing through the political boundaries. Social media is a digital platform, where people across the world can interact. This has a number of advantages of being universal, anonymous, easy accessibility, indirect interaction, gathering and sharing information when compared with direct interaction. The easy access to social networking sites (SNSs) such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs has brought about unprecedented opportunities for citizens to voice their opinions loaded with emotions/sentiments. Furthermore, social media can influence human thoughts. A recent incident of public importance had presented an opportunity to map the sentiments, involved around it. Sentiments were extracted from tweets for a week. These sentiments were classified as positive, negative and neutral and were mapped in geographic information system (GIS) environment. It was found that the number of tweets diminished by 91% over a week from 25 August 2017 to 31 August 2017. Maximum tweets emerged from places near the origin of the case (Haryana, Delhi and Punjab). The trend of sentiments was found to be – neutral (47.4%), negative (30%) and positive (22.6%). Interestingly, tweets were also coming from unexpected places such as United States, United Kingdom and West Asia. The result can also be used to assess the spatial distribution of digital penetration in India. The highest concentration was found to be around metropolitan cities, that is, Mumbai, Delhi and lowest in North East India and Jammu & Kashmir indicating the penetration of SNSs.