Unfacebooked, or a telcoms monopoly as seen from space
November 14, 2011
I’ve written before about Timorese interest in Facebook.
But with the continuing telcoms monopoly, Timorese people simply remain offline.
Below is a section of MIT grad student’s rendering of the “unFacebooked” world. Indonesia, including West Papua, is super connected. And Timor… increasingly has electricity (yellow dots) but no Facebook (dark green).
(The Facebook friendship map is dated December 2010. Let’s hope with the introduction of 3G the situation is no longer so bleak.)
November 21, 2011 at 2:39 pm
One reason Timor-Leste is completely missing from the Facebook map is that there are no places in Timor-Leste that are listed in the Facebook database. People who select Dili as their location are usually either selecting Dili, Mali or Dili, Democratic Republic of Congo, often without realizing it. Here is one group on Facebook hoping to fix it: http://www.facebook.com/pages/We-demand-FB-immediately-recognise-that-Dili-is-the-capital-of-Timor-Leste/229631113771230
Dan
November 23, 2011 at 11:29 pm
Thanks Dan. You make a real important point, I wonder how much of this applies to Africa as well. I notice some of the provincial capitals are misspelled in Mozambique for example. You might want to leave this as a comment on the original post by the MIT genius and see what he says?