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The Oxford Internet Institute is a research department of the University of Oxford, focusing on the social implications of the Internet and other advanced ICTs. Our multidisciplinary research faculty include political scientists, sociologists, lawyers, and economists who are engaged in a variety of research projects covering the themes of: Everyday Life, Governance and Democracy, Network Economy, Science and Learning and Shaping the Internet. One of our key missions is to stimulate and inform debate about the Internet, and to shape policy and practice around its (re)invention and use.

"A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers. MARK D. PAGEL is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Evolutionary Biology; Head of the Evolution Laboratory at the University of Reading; Author Oxford Encyclopaedia of Evolution; co-author of The Comparative Method in Evolutionary Biology. His forthcoming book is Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind."

Images are an important form of knowledge that allow us to develop understandings about our world. Flickr is the world's most used and most popular public repository of photographs and currently hosts over five billion images. This map reveals the global geographic distribution of geotagged images on the platform, and thus reveals the density of visual representations and locally depicted knowledge of all places on our planet.