Tecnologicamente mais perto do que é importante

Apesar da Internet e outros novos media diminuirem as distâncias, Tim Harford disserta sobre como as tecnologias nos aproximam sobretudo de quem está mais perto, porque a interacção face-a-face continua a ser fundamental no quotidiano.

O artigo
How Email Brings You Closer to the Guy in the Next Cubicle
By Tim Harford 01.18.08 6:00 PM

As a columnist (which is fancy for "journalist in jammies"), I ought to personify the conventional wisdom that distance is dead: All I need to get my work done is a place to perch and a Wi-Fi signal. But if that's true, why do I still live in London, the second-most expensive city in the world?
If distance really didn't matter, rents in places like London, New York, Bangalore, and Shanghai would be converging with those in Hitchcock County, Nebraska (population 2,926 and falling). Yet, as far as we can tell through the noise of the real estate bust, they aren't. Wharton real estate professor Joseph Gyourko talks instead of "superstar cities," which have become the equivalent of luxury goods — highly coveted and ultra-expensive. If geography has died, nobody bothered to tell Hitchcock County.

in Wired

A paráfrase
"Harvard economist Ed Glaeser, an expert on city economies, argues that communications technology and face-to-face interactions are complements like salt and pepper, rather than substitutes like butter and margarine."

A citação
"It found that email's real value isn't in communicating with Kuala Lumpur but with Betsy in the next cubicle."