Biases of social media

"In other words, it's a Peace Corps for geeks," Zuckerman said.

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In his conference presentation, titled "Listening to Global Voices," Zuckerman referred to a study by Fernando Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, which showed "that a lot of these trending topics [on Twitter] were basically segregated conversations and in ways'" one would not expect.

On Twitter, users may click on various topics that filter out homogenous groups of participants with particular interests.  The Viegas/Wattenberg study found, for instance, that the BP oil spill has largely become a conversation among white people, while a cookout is often a black conversation.

To reach such conclusions, the researchers took a sample of tweets in a "trending topic" and tried to determine the race of the person posting the comment. Because many Twitter users use their photos as their profile pictures, their method, although time-consuming, especially with large sample groups, proved effective, according to Zuckerman.

The web is a place "where we see the people we already know and the people who are similar to the people we already know.  And we tend not to see the wider picture," Zuckerman said.

Nick Negroponte, author of "Being Digital," called the Internet a powerful tool to bring together people from remote places while enriching cultural understanding across geographic terrains.

But according to Zuckerman, through examining and mapping networks across countries, research has revealed that some places are more interconnected than others.  For instance, London and New York are more connected than South American is to Africa.  And some regions are simply ignored.

As the world becomes global and connected in the economic framework, "media is less global by the day," Zuckerman said.  "New media isn't necessarily helping us that much."

He also indicated "heavily bias and dogmatic" electronic encyclopedias such as Wikipedia, in which most writers originate from North America or Western Europe.

Zuckerman has developed the concept of "Imaginary Cosmopolitanism," in which people on the web presume to be more aware and connected to the world than they actually are.