15,547 research outputs found
Daily Rhythms in Mobile Telephone Communication
Circadian rhythms are known to be important drivers of human activity and the recent availability of electronic records of human behaviour has provided fine-grained data of temporal patterns of activity on a large scale. Further, questionnaire studies have identified important individual differences in circadian rhythms, with people broadly categorised into morning-like or evening-like individuals. However, little is known about the social aspects of these circadian rhythms, or how they vary across individuals. In this study we use a unique 18-month dataset that combines mobile phone calls and questionnaire data to examine individual differences in the daily rhythms of mobile phone activity. We demonstrate clear individual differences in daily patterns of phone calls, and show that these individual differences are persistent despite a high degree of turnover in the individuals' social networks. Further, women's calls were longer than men's calls, especially during the evening and at night, and these calls were typically focused on a small number of emotionally intense relationships. These results demonstrate that individual differences in circadian rhythms are not just related to broad patterns of morningness and eveningness, but have a strong social component, in directing phone calls to specific individuals at specific times of day.TA and JS were funded by The Academy of Finland, project No. 260427 (http://www.aka.fi) and the computational resources were provided by Aalto 379 Science-IT project. The study was funded by a grant from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and Economic and Social Research Council (grant No. EP/D052114/2). RD is funded by European Research Council (grant no. 295663). The 380 collection of the data by SGBR and RD was made possible by a grant from the UK 381 EPSRC and ESRC research councils. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
The phone as a tool for combining online and offline social activity – teenagers’ phone access to an online community
We have analyzed two months of log data and 100 surveys on the phone use of a Swedish online community for teenagers to investigate the mobile use of an established online service. This shows that the phone use mostly takes place during times of the day when teenagers have social time and the use is not influenced by the availability of a computer. The phone makes the community access more private compared to the computer, but teens do share the use when they want to. The cell phone bridges the online and offline social communities and allows teens to participate in both at the same time. The online community is not only a place for social activity online, it is also a social activity offline that is carried out face-to-face with friends. The cell phone thus was a tool for the teens to combine their participation in the online and the offline world
Global Patterns of Synchronization in Human Communications
Social media are transforming global communication and coordination. The data
derived from social media can reveal patterns of human behavior at all levels
and scales of society. Using geolocated Twitter data, we have quantified
collective behaviors across multiple scales, ranging from the commutes of
individuals, to the daily pulse of 50 major urban areas and global patterns of
human coordination. Human activity and mobility patterns manifest the synchrony
required for contingency of actions between individuals. Urban areas show
regular cycles of contraction and expansion that resembles heartbeats linked
primarily to social rather than natural cycles. Business hours and circadian
rhythms influence daily cycles of work, recreation, and sleep. Different urban
areas have characteristic signatures of daily collective activities. The
differences are consistent with a new emergent global synchrony that couples
behavior in distant regions across the world. A globally synchronized peak that
includes exchange of ideas and information across Europe, Africa, Asia and
Australasia. We propose a dynamical model to explain the emergence of global
synchrony in the context of increasing global communication and reproduce the
observed behavior. The collective patterns we observe show how social
interactions lead to interdependence of behavior manifest in the
synchronization of communication. The creation and maintenance of temporally
sensitive social relationships results in the emergence of complexity of the
larger scale behavior of the social system.Comment: 20 pages, 12 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with
arXiv:1602.0621
The Rhythms of Transient Relationships: Allocating time between weekdays and weekends
A fundamental question of any new relationship is, will it last? Transient
relationships, recently defined by the authors, are an ideal type of social tie
to explore this question: these relationships are characterized by
distinguishable starting and ending temporal points, linking the question of
tie longevity to relationship finite lifetime. In this study, we use mobile
phone data sets from the UK and Italy to analyze the weekly allocation of time
invested in maintaining transient relationships. We find that more
relationships are created during weekdays, with a greater proportion of them
receiving more contact during these days of the week in the long term. The
smaller group of relationships that receive more phone calls during the weekend
tend to remain active for more time. We uncover a sorting process by which some
ties are moved from weekdays to weekends and vice versa, mostly in the first
half of the relationship. This process also carries more information about the
ultimate lifetime of a tie than the part of the week when the relationship
started, which suggests an early evaluation period that leads to a decision on
how to allocate time to different types of transient ties.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures. Submitted for review at Royal Society Open
Science R
The Role of Gender in Social Network Organization
The digital traces we leave behind when engaging with the modern world offer
an interesting lens through which we study behavioral patterns as expression of
gender. Although gender differentiation has been observed in a number of
settings, the majority of studies focus on a single data stream in isolation.
Here we use a dataset of high resolution data collected using mobile phones, as
well as detailed questionnaires, to study gender differences in a large cohort.
We consider mobility behavior and individual personality traits among a group
of more than university students. We also investigate interactions among
them expressed via person-to-person contacts, interactions on online social
networks, and telecommunication. Thus, we are able to study the differences
between male and female behavior captured through a multitude of channels for a
single cohort. We find that while the two genders are similar in a number of
aspects, there are robust deviations that include multiple facets of social
interactions, suggesting the existence of inherent behavioral differences.
Finally, we quantify how aspects of an individual's characteristics and social
behavior reveals their gender by posing it as a classification problem. We ask:
How well can we distinguish between male and female study participants based on
behavior alone? Which behavioral features are most predictive
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