Video Pandemics: Worldwide Viral Spreading of Psy's Gangnam Style Video

Viral videos can reach global penetration traveling through international channels of communication similarly to real diseases starting from a well-localized source. In past centuries, disease fronts propagated in a concentric spatial fashion from the the source of the outbreak via the short range human contact network. The emergence of long-distance air-travel changed these ancient patterns. However, recently, Brockmann and Helbing have shown that concentric propagation waves can be reinstated if propagation time and distance is measured in the flight-time and travel volume weighted underlying air-travel network. Here, we adopt this method for the analysis of viral meme propagation in Twitter messages, and define a similar weighted network distance in the communication network connecting countries and states of the World. We recover a wave-like behavior on average and assess the randomizing effect of non-locality of spreading. We show that similar result can be recovered from Google Trends data as well.Comment: 10 page

Spatial Fingerprints of Community Structure in Human Interaction Network for an Extensive Set of Large-Scale Regions

Human interaction networks inferred from country-wide telephone activity recordings were recently used to redraw political maps by projecting their topological partitions into geographical space. The results showed remarkable spatial cohesiveness of the network communities and a significant overlap between the redrawn and the administrative borders. Here we present a similar analysis based on one of the most popular online social networks represented by the ties between more than 5.8 million of its geo-located users. The worldwide coverage of their measured activity allowed us to analyze the large-scale regional subgraphs of entire continents and an extensive set of examples for single countries. We present results for North and South America, Europe and Asia. In our analysis we used the well- established method of modularity clustering after an aggregation of the individual links into a weighted graph connecting equal- area geographical pixels. Our results show fingerprints of both of the opposing forces of dividing local conflicts and of uniting cross-cultural trends of globalization