Geographies of an online social network

Abstract

How is online social media activity structured in the geographical space? Recent studies have shown that in spite of earlier visions about the "death of distance", physical proximity is still a major factor in social tie formation and maintenance in virtual social networks. Yet, it is unclear, what are the characteristics of the distance dependence in online social networks. In order to explore this issue the complete network of the former major Hungarian online social network is analyzed. We find that the distance dependence is weaker for the online social network ties than what was found earlier for phone communication networks. For a further analysis we introduced a coarser granularity: We identified the settlements with the nodes of a network and assigned two kinds of weights to the links between them. When the weights are proportional to the number of contacts we observed weakly formed, but spatially based modules resembling to the borders of macro-regions, the highest level of regional administration in the country. If the weights are defined relative to an uncorrelated null model, the next level of administrative regions, counties are reflected.

19 pages pdf file. Minor changes mainly about users abroad plus maps redrawn

References in corpus (5)

• Fast unfolding of communities in large networks
• Structure and tie strengths in mobile communication networks
• Validation of Dunbar's number in Twitter conversations
• Geographical dispersal of mobile communication networks
• Distance Is Not Dead: Social Interaction and Geographical Distance in the Internet Era

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Natural Scales in Geographical Patterns
• Inequality is rising where social network segregation interacts with urban topology
• Algorithmic bias amplifies opinion polarization: A bounded confidence model
• Social capital predicts corruption risk in towns
• The role of geography in the complex diffusion of innovations
• Cascading collapse of online social networks
• What does Big Data tell? Sampling the social network by communication channels
• Schools are segregated by educational outcomes in the digital space
• Quantifying Barriers of Urban Mobility
• Connectivity and Community Structure of Online and Register-based Social Networks
• Inventor collaboration and its persistence across European regions
• Geospatial analysis of toponyms in geotagged social media posts
• Mathematical models to explain the origin of urban scaling laws: a synthetic review
• Flexible model of network embedding
• Spatially concentrated social capital of urban residents
• Homophilic organization of egocentric communities in ICT services