I love StumbleUpon..it is one of my favorite Firefox extensions. I usually hit it a few times a weekend just to see what comes up.
Today, the International Networks Archive, a project driven by the Princeton University Sociology Department, was on my screen from my click on the StumbleUpon toolbar. I took a dive into it. Fascinating stuff to this little budding info architect. From their About page:
Globalization involves a variety of links expanding and tightening a web of political, economic and cultural inter-connections (Mittelman 1997, Hirst and Thompson, 1996). Most attention has been devoted to merchandise trade as it has had the most immediate (or most visible) consequences, …
Human movements also link previously separate communities. … Finally, there is the cultural connection. The ubiquity of CNN is already something of a cliché, and entertainment industry budgets now make calculations on the basis of a global market. Hollywood and Silicon Valley software entertains and informs the world. All the individual data would indicate that we are undergoing a process of compression of international time and space and an intensification of international relations. The separation of production and consumption that is the heart of modern capitalism appears to have reached its zenith. Globalization is not just another “buzz-word” (globaloney?), but very much a real and significant phenomenon.
But, what does it mean? What does a globalized world look like?
Then, they start to show us what it looks like, through the network maps..go take a look and the Mapping Globalization project as well, they are amazing works of graphic design as well as information design. I think Tufte would be proud. They give me a techy-feely glow. I want to spend more time on this site thinking about how the information is presented AND the information that is being presented.