The Mesh of Civilizations and International Email Flows No material in this paper may be cited or published in whole or in part without prior written permission of the authors.
Year: 2013
Type: preprint
Abstract: In The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington argued that the primary axis of global conflict was no longer ideological or eco-nomic but cultural and religious, and that this division would char-acterize the “battle lines of the future. ” In contrast to the "top down" approach in previous research focused on the relations among na-tion states, we focused on the flows of interpersonal communica-tion as a bottom-up view of international alignments. To that end, we mapped the locations of the world’s countries in global email networks to see if we could detect cultural fault lines. Using IP-geolocation on a worldwide anonymized dataset obtained from a large Internet company, we constructed a global email network. In computing email flows we employ a novel rescaling procedure to account for differences due to uneven adoption of a particular Inter-net service across the world. Our analysis shows that email flows are consistent with Huntington’s thesis. In addition to location in Huntington’s “civilizations, ” our results also attest to the impor-tance of both cultural and economic factors in the patterning of inter-country communication ties.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Language: English
Subfield: Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2182093908