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new work by JULIAN HIBBARD
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Preparing steamed buns!
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![oldbeirut:
Beiruti Men [1889]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m33mb89Oek1qhij65o1_500.jpg)
Beiruti Men [1889]
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New York City skyline
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Freedom tower #nyc
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Confirmed: The Internet Does Not Solve Global Inequality
If you live in a rich country, the Internet has probably changed the way you consume (and produce) information. But when you look at global-scale knowledge production, things are as they ever were: the Anglophone world dominates with the United States doing the lion’s share of academic and user-generated publishing.
Those are the messages of the Oxford Internet Institute’s new e-book, Geographies of the World’s Knowledge, from which the above graphics were drawn. The book’s authors, Corinne Flick of the Convoco Foundation and the Institute’s Mark Graham and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, reluctantly conclude that the Internet has not delivered on the hopes that it would make knowledge “more accessible.”
“Many commentators speculated that [the Internet] would allow people outside of industrialised nations to gain access to all networked and codified knowledge, thus mitigating the traditionally concentrated nature of information production and consumption,” they write. “These early expectations remain largely unrealised.”
We’re not only talking about publishing in academic journals or Wikipedia. The researchers also sampled user-generated content on Google and found that rich countries, especially the United States, dominate the production of user content.
The fact of the matter is that people without money can’t afford to get the education necessary to publish in academic journals, Internet-enabled or not. The other fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people in very poor countries don’t spend their time producing content for free. Hope as we might, the Internet isn’t a magic wand that makes the world more equal.
Read more. [Image: Oxford Internet Institute]
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Why People in Cities Walk Fast
So how do I find the city with the right pace for me? Somewhere between New York and Berlin. I always knew I walked a bit too slowly for New York…
“The resulting correlation between walking speed and population was strikingly linear. With only a couple exceptions, people in places like Brooklyn, New York (pop: 2.6 million), walked faster than those in places like Psychro, Greece (pop: 365). The analysis indicated not only that life moves faster in the city than in the countryside, but that “pace of life varies in a regular fashion with the size of the local population, regardless of the cultural setting,”(Source: shriyashriyashriya)
