Global E-mail Patterns Reveal “Clash of Civilizations”..
In 1992 [..] Samuel Huntington suggested that future conflicts would be driven largely by cultural differences. He went on to map out a new world order in which the people of the world are divided into nine culturally distinct civilisations. These include: Western civilisation; Latin American civilisation; the Orthodox world of former Soviet Union countries; the Sinic civilisation including China, the Koreas and Vietnam; the Muslim world of the greater Middle East; Sub-Saharan Africa and so on [..].
[Researchers] have analysed a global database of e-mail messages, and their locations, sent by more than 10 million people over the space of a year. State and co say that the pattern of connections between these people, clearly reflects the civilisations mapped out by Huntington. In other words, the way we send e-mails is a reflection of the mesh of civilisations that is an important driver of future conflict [..]. The researchers then counted the instances in which users swapped messages with each other, considering this to be evidence of a tie between the countries where these users were located. This gave them a simple count of the number of ties between pairs of countries around the world