Despite technology enabling people to connect with friends and family living on the other side of the world, most of us still use the internet and smartphones to communicate inside a 100-mile radius, research suggests.
Rather than creating a “global village”, less than 10 per cent of communications from those in both the North and the South of Britain cross a dividing line 100 miles north of London, the research found.
The study, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that invisible borders still exist in this country, as well as in Italy, France and Belgium, often following traditional geographical and historical divides.
People still connect in “a geographically cohesive, connected set of communities”, according to the authors.
The study found that in Britain only 9.5 per cent of communications crossed the “border” between north and south.
In Belgium, 3.5 per cent of contact runs between Flanders and Wallonia, according to the paper published in the journal Plos One this week.
Belgium has long had a linguistic and social divide between the Flemish-speaking Flanders region, in the north, and French-speaking Wallonia, in the south, and the study seemed to confirm this division. Carlo Ratti, an associate professor at MIT’s Senseable City Lab, who led the research, said: “We are looking at networks to think about how communities are structured over space.” The study is part of a larger effort, he added, to see “how we can use these technologies to better understand the extent of constituencies and communities”.
He said even when communication patterns reflect pre-existing administrative or historical boundaries they “can still show a more natural geography that emerges from people”.
The study found in France communications followed the country’s historical administrative regions, but an east-west divide occurred. Researchers said they thought the findings could be useful in the future when governments are considering changing political or administrative boundaries.
Prof Ratti added: “You can see in advance how well newly proposed borders match with the actual human interactions.”
He said he hoped the research would contribute to a “science of cities”.
The research examined data from France, the UK, Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and the Ivory Coast. It used data from Orange, BT Group, Telecom Italia, and the Saudi Telecom Company which was mapped to see network patterns across regions and communities.