Understanding the Heavy Tailed Dynamics in Human Behavior

The recent availability of electronic datasets containing large volumes of communication data has made it possible to study human behavior on a larger scale than ever before. From this, it has been discovered that across a diverse range of data sets, the inter-event times between consecutive communication events obey heavy tailed power law dynamics. Explaining this has proved controversial, and two distinct hypotheses have emerged. The first holds that these power laws are fundamental, and arise from the mechanisms such as priority queuing that humans use to schedule tasks. The second holds that they are a statistical artifact which only occur in aggregated data when features such as circadian rhythms and burstiness are ignored. We use a large social media data set to test these hypotheses, and find that although models that incorporate circadian rhythms and burstiness do explain part of the observed heavy tails, there is residual unexplained heavy tail behavior which suggests a more fundamental cause. Based on this, we develop a new quantitative model of human behavior which improves on existing approaches, and gives insight into the mechanisms underlying human interactions.Comment: 9 pages in Physical Review E, 201

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

Sociology’s Rhythms: Temporal Dimensions of Knowledge Production

From the temporal perspective, this article examines shifts in the productionof sociological knowledge. It identifies two kinds of rhythms of sociology: 1) that of sociological standpoints and techniques of investigation and 2) that of contemporary academic life and culture. The article begins by discussing some of the existing research strategies designed to "chase"high-speed society. Some, predominantly methodological, currents are explored and contrasted with the "slow" instruments of sociological analysis composed of different, yet complementary, modes of inquiry. Against this background, the article stresses that it is through the tension between fast and slow modes of inquiry that sociology reproduces itself. The subsequent part explores the subjective temporal experience in contemporary academia. It is argued that increasing administration and auditing of intellectual work significantly coshapes sociological knowledge production not only by requiring academics to work faster due to an increasing volume of tasks, but also by normalizing time-pressure.The article concludes by considering the problem as to whether the increasing pace of contemporary academic life has detrimental consequences for the more organic reproductive rhythms of sociology

Evolution of Conversations in the Age of Email Overload

Email is a ubiquitous communications tool in the workplace and plays an important role in social interactions. Previous studies of email were largely based on surveys and limited to relatively small populations of email users within organizations. In this paper, we report results of a large-scale study of more than 2 million users exchanging 16 billion emails over several months. We quantitatively characterize the replying behavior in conversations within pairs of users. In particular, we study the time it takes the user to reply to a received message and the length of the reply sent. We consider a variety of factors that affect the reply time and length, such as the stage of the conversation, user demographics, and use of portable devices. In addition, we study how increasing load affects emailing behavior. We find that as users receive more email messages in a day, they reply to a smaller fraction of them, using shorter replies. However, their responsiveness remains intact, and they may even reply to emails faster. Finally, we predict the time to reply, length of reply, and whether the reply ends a conversation. We demonstrate considerable improvement over the baseline in all three prediction tasks, showing the significant role that the factors that we uncover play, in determining replying behavior. We rank these factors based on their predictive power. Our findings have important implications for understanding human behavior and designing better email management applications for tasks like ranking unread emails.Comment: 11 page, 24th International World Wide Web Conferenc

Cultures in Community Question Answering

CQA services are collaborative platforms where users ask and answer questions. We investigate the influence of national culture on people's online questioning and answering behavior. For this, we analyzed a sample of 200 thousand users in Yahoo Answers from 67 countries. We measure empirically a set of cultural metrics defined in Geert Hofstede's cultural dimensions and Robert Levine's Pace of Life and show that behavioral cultural differences exist in community question answering platforms. We find that national cultures differ in Yahoo Answers along a number of dimensions such as temporal predictability of activities, contribution-related behavioral patterns, privacy concerns, and power inequality.Comment: Published in the proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT'15

Tweeting the Mind and Instagramming the Heart: Exploring Differentiated Content Sharing on Social Media

Understanding the usage of multiple OSNs (Online Social Networks) has been of significant research interest as it helps in identifying the unique and distinguishing trait in each social media platform that contributes to its continued existence. The comparison between the OSNs is insightful when it is done based on the representative majority of the users holding active accounts on all the platforms. In this research, we collected a set of user profiles holding accounts on both Twitter and Instagram, these platforms being of prominence among a majority of users. An extensive textual and visual analysis on the media content posted by these users revealed that both these platforms are indeed perceived differently at a fundamental level with Instagram engaging more of the users' heart and Twitter capturing more of their mind. These differences got reflected in almost every microscopic analysis done upon the linguistic, topical and visual aspects.Comment: 4 pages, 8 figure