Global E-mail Patterns Reveal “Clash of Civilizations”
In 1992 [..] Samuel Huntington suggested that future conflicts would be driven largely by cultural differences. He went on to map out a new world order in which the people of the world are divided into nine culturally distinct civilisations. These include: Western civilisation; Latin American civilisation; the Orthodox world of former Soviet Union countries; the Sinic civilisation including China, the Koreas and Vietnam; the Muslim world of the greater Middle East; Sub-Saharan Africa and so on [..].
[Researchers] have analysed a global database of e-mail messages, and their locations, sent by more than 10 million people over the space of a year. State and co say that the pattern of connections between these people, clearly reflects the civilisations mapped out by Huntington. In other words, the way we send e-mails is a reflection of the mesh of civilisations that is an important driver of future conflict [..]. The researchers then counted the instances in which users swapped messages with each other, considering this to be evidence of a tie between the countries where these users were located. This gave them a simple count of the number of ties between pairs of countries around the world.
Actually a more proper definition would be that the researchers found “cultural blocks”; noone can know for sure these blocks would “clash” (it does make a flashier title however).
The existence of these blocks confirms what we’ve been saying for some time - technology strengthens internal connections of existing blocks, and globalization, as a rule, is an inferior method to explain world events. It is not some unstoppable force that just grows and grows. In terms of tech, just because you can watch some “bonsai cam” webcasting from Japan does not mean you will. Are you interested in bonsai? Is it part of your culture?