Once we stop looking at the infrastructure - the roads, the air routes, the shipping lanes, the cables - and start looking at the flows of traffic, it becomes very clear that some parts of the world are far more connected than others. Globalization is unequally distributed. London and New York are a whole lot closer than Johannesburg and Rio.\n
first, it's worth remembering that the world wide web is hardly worldwide. This composite picture of the earth at night is now a decade old, but it still serves as a pretty good portrait of the 1.8 billion people who are online and the 4.8 billion who aren't. \n\nThose dark spots on the map aren't silent - they just tend not to be well represented in the world's media. Through Global Voices, I have a lot of friends in Madagascar, and I can tell you that one of the central annoyances in their lives is being better known for the Dreamworks film than for the natural wonders of their nation\n
The infrastructures of a globalized world lead us to believe that we're living in a flat, Friedmanesque world. From London, Bangalore's just one hop away, and Suva's just a hop further.\n
And the media we’re collectively creating on sites like Wikipedia shows these sorts of biases as well - this is a study done by Mark Graham at the Oxford Internet Institute down the road, showing articles on wikipedia that have geocoding information. It gives a sense for some of the geographic biases we see on wikipedia as a whole, and the strength and weakness of the project in covering different parts of the world\n