I learned about this graphic through the infographic blog, Flowing Data. Digging deeper, I found that this is actually a fairly clever interactive map that enables the user to identify specific communication routes by country.
What initially intrigued me about this graphic is that we are seeing, in a way, the nervous system of the world, how we communicate with each other. It got me to wondering how our current flow of information conincides with the flow of how we initially (according to recorded history) connected with each other.
It might be interesting to super-impose on this map, a map of the earliest (European) explorers as they discovered new worlds (from their perspective). I’m trying the tread lightly here 
Blog Post: http://goo.gl/m0qmf
Graphic: http://goo.gl/IvT7J
Interactive Graphic: http://goo.gl/oEcXf
Sources: http://goo.gl/KQ7Lt