The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been monitoring all of New York City's digital communication for several months with the help of AT&T labs. The project collected and analyzed the global communication patterns of each of New York's neighborhoods, and some of the early results are currently part of the new "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.

Researchers used data on cell phones, e-mail, VoIP (Web-based phone calls) and Web browsing to create visualizations for the New York Talk Exchange exhibit. Carlo Ratti, an MIT researcher, said, "Our cities and the globe are blanketed with flowing bits of digital data, and looking at this data, we're able to better understand the physical world."

By observing communication levels over time and among the different populations in the city, the researchers have found that both the rich and poor maintain high levels of global communication (phone, Internet). Interestingly, the middle levels of society communicate primarily only nationally and locally. Other findings include: Communications surge globally after the New York Stock Exchange opens, the most-called city from Manhattan is London, and the second most-called city is Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

"In the end, the NYTE project reveals as much about the city of New York as it does about its worldwide counterparts, in areas such as business, culture and immigration," Ratti said. "In other words, our visualizations demonstrate that in the information age, urban life is as global as it is local."

From USA Today

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