Time allocation in social networks: correlation between social structure and human communication dynamics

Abstract

Recent research has shown the deep impact of the dynamics of human interactions (or temporal social networks) on the spreading of information, opinion formation, etc. In general, the bursty nature of human interactions lowers the interaction between people to the extent that both the speed and reach of information diffusion are diminished. Using a large database of 20 million users of mobile phone calls we show evidence this effect is not homogeneous in the social network but in fact, there is a large correlation between this effect and the social topological structure around a given individual. In particular, we show that social relations of hubs in a network are relatively weaker from the dynamical point than those that are poorer connected in the information diffusion process. Our results show the importance of the temporal patterns of communication when analyzing and modeling dynamical process on social networks.

16 pages, 7 figures, Chapter of the book "Temporal Networks", Springer, 2013. Series: Understanding Complex Systems. Holme, Petter; Saramaki, Jari (Eds.)

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Modern temporal network theory: A colloquium
• Dynamics on networks: competition of temporal and topological correlations
• From temporal network data to the dynamics of social relationships
• Inference of Demographic Attributes based on Mobile Phone Usage Patterns and Social Network Topology
• Temporal Pattern of Online Communication Spike Trains in Spreading a Scientific Rumor: How Often, Who Interacts with Whom?