For the last couple of days, I’ve been following the events in the Middle East with some fascination. All over the foreign press, hardly a peep in the local Chinese press (to be expected). The turmoil in Iran has actually made me, for the first time since the U.S. election cycle, wish that I had access to CNN — well, almost.

Instead of Iran, the local media has been engaged in the usual mid-summer boredom. Nothing really going on, nothing to report, so let’s dwell on mundane dreck.

In that spirit, and since I can’t really post something about Iran on this blog (two reasons: first, I know absolutely nothing about that country or its present “troubles”; and second, I’m not running an Iran blog here), how about this interesting issue on globalization from one of MIT’s Technology Review blogs?

The Internet has dramatically changed our ability to communicate. It’s easier today than it’s ever been to talk to, e-mail, or IM friends, colleagues, and family on the other side of the planet. For this reason, we’re often told that the world is shrinking and that the Internet has created a borderless, global village in which geographical proximity is playing an increasingly smaller role.

But this received wisdom is wrong, say Jacob Goldenberg and Moshe Levy at the Hebrew University, in Jerusalem. “We argue that the opposite is the case: in our contemporary IT-intensive world, geographical proximity has become an even stronger force than ever before,” they say.

And they make a persuasive case. Goldenberg and Levy say that while it is just as easy to e-mail somebody who lives on the same street as somebody on the other side of the world, it turns out that we have a huge preference for sending messages over shorter distances.

To the extent that this research can poke a hole, albeit a tiny one, in some of the popular Friedman-ish wisdom on globalization, it’s worth discussing. That being said, I think it’s useful for expat types in particular to remind ourselves that our weird lifestyle is not really the norm in the world.

The expat lifestyle, among other things, involves doing a lot of work via email/phone with folks in other countries, corresponding with friends and relatives in other countries, and getting our news and entertainment from sources in other countries — all via the Intertubes, unless they get clogged up as happens from time to time, or mobile phone.

Additionally, there are lots of folks whose jobs put them in touch with colleagues and other business associates in other countries. For most of these people, their overseas correspondence is purely business, though, and it is doubtful that they have a lot of foreign penpals out there.

That leaves everyone else. Not really surprising that your average person sending non-business-related email or SMSs is writing to a friend/family who is not too far away. People travel over their lifetimes, but not so far from home as your average expat.

So I think that this study makes some sense. On the other hand, it would be really interesting to get the same results for purely business correspondence. I think personal/social traffic is probably very different. Compare, for example, the number of emails you send during a typical business day (how many to friends and family vs. business associates?) to normal IM or SMS traffic (certainly a more local list of contacts, I would imagine). On a given day, I might engage in a 17-part email string about a single contract provision, seriously gumming up my Inbox, or spend an inexplicably long time IM-ing a friend to arrange particulars for an evening drink-up.

It is certainly true that the Internet and other tech allows us to communicate with folks that are far away, and many more people these days have a need to do so. But just because I can send an email to someone in Bangladesh, it doesn’t mean that I have a reason to do so, although I would like to complain to someone over there about the poorly-stitched blouse my wife bought at H&M the other day. (Why import textiles into China? I don’t get it.)

I could go outside right now, find a cab driver at random, and quiz him about the latest international football news (hurrah! says Tom Friedman, there’s your globalization). Yes, the cab driver might know a lot about the Premier League, but he is not sending an SMS to buddies in Liverpool or Manchester.

So what’s the point? I think the business world, to the extent that it is much more international than it used to be due to global trade, is responsible for a huge increase in international communications traffic. But I think it is easy to lose sight of the individual in all this — most people still live, go to work, and entertain themselves in a city, town or village and communicate with their local peers. To these people’s personal lives, the world isn’t flat, it is comprised of two places: the limited valley that they live in, and everywhere else.