Emotional Connections.(The Technologist)(maps that show data traffic travel between New York and more than 200 countries)

Byline: Benjamin Sutherland

When it's daytime in New York, callers in other time zones get up very early, or stay up very late, to talk to the Big Apple.

What is globalization? Most answers lead quickly to abstractions about trade, finance and the movement of people. Carlo Ratti, by contrast, has come up with something far more concrete. Working with data from AT&T, the U.S. telecommunications operator, Ratti and his team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed luminous and fluctuating maps that show how international phone calls and data traffic travel between New York and more than 200 countries. "It's like having a real-time view of globalization," says Ratti, who directs mapping research at MIT. Phone calls and data flows are good indicators of how the world is organizing itself.

The wall-size maps, on display at New York's Museum of Modern Art, are "as engaging as a good movie," says curator Paola Antonelli. (The maps, called "New York Time Exchange," are part of an exhibition entitled "Design and the Elastic Mind," which runs through May 12.) As flows of telecommunications data change, arcs of light, glowing dots and landmasses expand and shrink. (The maps aren't quite in real time: data are delayed for two hours for technical reasons.) The result is a vivid and emotional picture of a united world. The information may also yield insights into social patterns.

On one map, regions expand as the number of phone connections with New York increases. This reveals a global pecking order of sorts: when it is day in New York, callers in other time zones get up very early, or stay up very late, to talk to the Big Apple. But the reverse isn't true; the world accommodates New York, but New Yorkers don't accommodate the world. "It's as if these [time-zone] lines get distorted and bend inwards into the city of New York," says Kristian Kloeckl, project leader at MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory, which designed the maps.

The maps are not pure art, but part of ongoing research into how the world exchanges data. MIT researchers studied British Telecom data to gauge, among other things, the influence of New York with that of rival London (the BT data were not mapped). MIT's findings? New York has more telephone contact than London not just with Latin America, as was expected, but also with Asia. This shows up as more calls and more minutes connected, even for certain parts of the Middle East--including Riyadh--despite the greater time difference. Saskia Sassen, a globalization sociologist at New York's Columbia University who was privy to the BT data, refers to these mapped phone calls as "a geography of power." She notes that tallies of international phone calls is a good approximate measure ...