Last week there was an interesting post on the Fast Company newsletter: ‘Most people use the web to talk to people nearby’. . . It seems nothings has changed. Did we think that the web would open the world to us? Did we think we would start global relationships, even friendships,  thanks to the web? Well, it seems our world is still as small and provincial as it used to be. 

Remember the old rule: your contact with your co-workers decreases with every meter your office is located further from that colleague? Well, it seems it’s still applicable even with everything the internet has to offer.

Jacob Goldenberg and Moshe Levy from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem did a study on ‘social interaction and geographical distance in the internet era’ and concluded: “Counter intuitively the importance of geographic proximity has dramatically increased with the internet revolution”.  They studied data from 100,000 participants that were both Facebook users and email users. They found that most Facebook users’ friends are within several miles of their location. But they also found that emailing followed the same pattern: they collected data of 4,455 messages and found that 41% of the emails were sent within their own city.  From these facts they concluded that the internet may have made distance even more important. To see if this is really the case they studied the geographical spreading of names for newborns. Here too the physical proximity seemed to play and important role – like the spreading of an epidemic. Their conclusion: proximity is more important than ever.

So where does that leave us? Where does it leave the global village? Is the world wide web making us more provincial? Are we maybe scared of the big world outside? Does this also give us an inkling why politicians in this country are becoming more and more provincial?  Why we are more scared of ‘strangers’ than we were in the sixties?  Or does it have nothing to do with it. Of course this is only one small study, but still, It would be interesting if someone studied the relation between the spreading of the web and us becoming more provincial. Anyway, it is at least an interesting detail for us to consider.

tagged with: global village

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