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Ring Around N.Y.C.
Posted Mar 4,2009
Phone-calls-455
Click to expand graphic.

Every Sunday, New Yorker Felicia Persaud calls her parents in Guyana. For an hour they chat: Is everyone OK? Any family news? She spends about a hundred dollars a month on the calls but doesn’t mind. Hearing her parents makes her feel "they’re right here." Besides, her taciturn dad turns out to be a big phone talker.

Guyana is one of nearly 200 countries on New York City's foreign-calling roster in a typical month. That’s the line from the New York Talk Exchange, a project run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and AT&T Labs. The data offers an “instant view of globalization—and of how beautifully interconnected the world is,” says Carlo Ratti, director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab. The millions of calls also show that even in an era of email and text messages, folks like the Persauds crave the intimacy of the old-fashioned telephone.

Posted by Marc Silver | Comments (0)
Filed Under: Wide Angle
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