Emotional Connections

Globalization's losers also stand out starkly on MIT's maps. A glance shows that the information age has left much of Africa behind: few of the gold arcs representing intense Internet traffic touch the continent. Jagdish Bhagwati, an economics professor at Columbia University in New York who has served as an adviser on globalization to the United Nations, says a well-developed telecommunications infrastructure and culture can help nudge populations in the developing world toward wealth but also democracy. When people are able to communicate wide and far and access information online, they see themselves as empowered stakeholders in a society that they can improve, Bhagwati says. Phone networks in particular are powerful tools for democracy and modernity because immigrants call loved ones abroad to deliver eyewitness reports, unfiltered by the media, of new ways of living.

MIT's maps are a poignant reminder that humanity has never been so connected. William Mitchell, a professor at MIT's Media Lab who advised the researchers, says the "tremendous emotional charge" of the maps matches the rush he felt decades ago when he first looked at a NASA photograph of a blue Earth floating in dark space.

© 2008