A social object is the reason people get together; it’s the objects we share, the images we e-mail each other, the moments we experience. The building blocks to relationships, social objects tie people together in intrinsic ways and in today’s day and age there is a myriad of social objects around us. Thanks to social networks, our day-to-day lives have become based around these objects, whether it’s Reddit and it’s links, YouTube and it’s videos or Facebook and it’s photos. Social objects are important because they define us as groups and individuals. 

They are context dependent and thus, they say a lot a about our friends, our societies and us. Social objects can cause social action, from something as simple as the emergence of niche music genres in YouTube to the creation of the Arab Spring (think YouTube, Twitter and Facebook). This is not to say that social objects are something new but rather that today, because of social networks, social objects has become one with our every day lives.

In the map below you can see evidence of the proliferation of social networks. Think of each one based around a single or a couple of social objects.