Under the slogan “Our Changing World”, FedEx has developed a website with various cartograms showing world-wide socio-economic changes based on publicly available data from sources such as World Bank, UNESCO, World Health Organization and others.
Cartograms visualize a particular metric by adjusting a country’s size corresponding to that metric. It leaves country neighborhood relationships (which we blogged about here) intact, but inflates or deflates countries, often dramatically so. Here is a series of three cartograms showing the adoption of mobile phones in the years 1995, 2000, and 2008. Size of each country is proportional to the density of mobile phones (average # mobile phones per 100 people).
From the Topic Info on the Mobile Phone Presence display:
In 1996, mobile phones were a Nordic phenomenon. A Swede was twice as likely as an American to awn one, and five times as likely as a German. Skip forward four years and the picture changed radically. Mobile phone usage boomed ten-fold across Europe; most European nations caught up with their northern neighbours. Eight years later. Africa suddenly loomed large. Mobile-phone penetration in same emerging economies now outstrips that of the developed world; Algeria tops the US. In most countries, mobile phone use is now ubiquitous. Lacking a mobile phone is more striking today than possessing one.
Indeed, it’s hard to find a country with very small mobile phone presence – and then to pinpoint it on the cartogram. One country I found was Cuba: While most countries in the Americas have between 50-100, Cuba has only 3 mobile phones per 100 people.