Segregated interactions in urban and online space

Nature communications, 2017

It is commonly believed that patterns of social ties affect individuals' economic status. Here we translate this concept into an operational definition at the network level, which allows us to infer the economic well-being of individuals through a measure of their location and influence in the social network. We analyse two large-scale sources: telecommunications and financial data of a whole country's population. Our results show that an individual's location, measured as the optimal collective influence to the structural integrity of the social network, is highly correlated with personal economic status. The observed social network patterns of influence mimic the patterns of economic inequality. For pragmatic use and validation, we carry out a marketing campaign that shows a threefold increase in response rate by targeting individuals identified by our social network metrics as compared to random targeting. Our strategy can also be useful in maximizing the effects of l...

11th International Symposium of Space Syntax

Integrating social and spatial networks will be critical to new approaches to cities as material systems of interaction. In this paper, we propose a way of doing so by focusing on the spatial and temporal conditions of formation of social networks – namely, on 'encounters' as a key social event. Drawing on classic approaches such as Freeman's concept of segregation as 'restriction on contact' and Hägerstrand's time-geography, and recent explorations of social media locational data, we analysed the space-time structure of potential encounters latent in the urban trajectories of agents differentiated by income levels in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This approach allows us to estimate agents' urban trajectories examining geographic spatiotemporal positions in tweets, visualise income groups as potentially overlapping class networks, assess spaces of potential encounter and levels of social diversity on the streets. Finally, we discuss our findings and the utility and limitations of this approach in grasping a temporal 'geography of potential encounters' and segregated networks.

Abstract. Segregation has been one of the most persistent features of cities and therefore one of the main research topics in social studies. From a tradition that can be traced back to the Chicago School in the early 20th century, social segregation has been seen as the natural consequence of the social division of space, reducing segregation territorial segregation and taking the space as a substitute for social distance. We propose a change in the focus of static segregation of places to as social segregation is played by embodied urban trajectories. We analysed trajectories of groups of social actors differentiated by income levels in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Firstly, we used metadata from Twitter users moving around the city to derive geographic coordinates and timestamp of tweets, and identified users’ origins and destinations. Then we crossed information on trajectories with socioeconomic data in order to see potential social networks according to income, assess their spatial behaviour and potential spaces of social convergence – a geography of the segregative / integrative potential of encounters. This approach is intended to recast the spatiality of segregation potentially active in the circumstances of social contact in the city rather than in static territories and patterns of residential location. Key words: segregation, mobilities, social networks, Big Data.

arXiv (Cornell University), 2016

Social media content shared today in cities, such as Instagram images, their tags and descriptions, is the key form of contemporary city life. It tells people where activities and locations that interest them are and it allows them to share their urban experiences and self-representations. Therefore, any analysis of urban structures and cultures needs to consider social media activity. In our paper, we introduce the novel concept of social media inequality. This concept allows us to quantitatively compare patterns in social media activities between parts of a city, a number of cities, or any other spatial areas. We define this concept using an analogy with the concept of economic inequality. Economic inequality indicates how some economic characteristics or material resources, such as income, wealth or consumption are distributed in a city, country or between countries. Accordingly, we can define social media inequality as the measure of the distribution of characteristics from social media content shared in a particular geographic area or between areas. An example of such characteristics is the number of photos shared by all users of a social network such as Instagram in a given city or city area, or the content of these photos. We propose that the standard inequality measures used in other disciplines, such as the Gini coefficient, can also be used to characterize social media inequality. To test our ideas, we use a dataset of 7,442,454 public geo-coded Instagram images shared in Manhattan during five months (March-July) in 2014, and also selected data for 287 Census tracts in Manhattan. We compare patterns in Instagram sharing for locals and for visitors for all tracts, and also for hours in a 24-hour cycle. We also look at relations between social media inequality and socioeconomic inequality using selected indicators for Census tracts.

American Sociological Review

Homophily, the tendency for similar actors to be connected at a higher rate than dissimilar actors, is a pervasive social fact. In this article, we examine changes over a 20-year period in two types of homophily—the actual level of contact between people in different social categories and the level of contact relative to chance. We use data from the 1985 and 2004 General Social Surveys to ask whether the strengths of five social distinctions—sex, race/ethnicity, religious affiliation, age, and education—changed over the past two decades in core discussion networks. Changes in the actual level of homophily are driven by the demographic composition of the United States. As the nation has become more diverse, cross-category contacts in race/ethnicity and religion have increased. After describing the raw homophily rates, we develop a case-control model to assess homophily relative to chance mixing. We find decreasing rates of homophily for gender but stability for race and age, although...

In conjunction with developments in communication technologies, life spaces of people also change and develop. What constitutes the most important building block of these new life spaces are digital communication resources. Digital communication resources form new spaces in social media by manipulating identities and cultures. These new spaces create socio-spatial segregations, whether consciously or unconsciously. Especially in recent years, grouping is observed intensely in social media and from time to time these groups play an important role in mass actions. In this study, closed and secret groups formed in social media were examined, with qualitative and quantitative research methods. Within this context, through in-depth interviews with group admins and survey study with group members , socio-spatial segregation in social media and grouping processes in social media were examined. RESUMEN: El hábitat humano está cambiando y desarrollando con los avances tecnológicos de la co-municación. Los recursos de comunicación digital es el bloque de construcción más importante para es-te cambio y desarrollo. Los recursos de comunicación digital estan manipulando las identidades y cultu-ras creando nuevos lugares en los medios sociales. Esto crea segregación socio-espacial consciente o in-conscientemente. Particularmente en los últimos años se observan agrupaciones en los medios sociales y estos grupos algunas veces juegan un importante papel en el movimiento de las masas. En este estu-dio se observan a los grupos cerrados y clandestinos con los métodos de investigación cuantitativos y cualitativos. En este sentido se analizaron los procesos de segregación socio-espacial y la forma de ser del grupo en los medios sociales haciendo entrevistas a los directores y encuestas a los miembros de los grupos.

This paper analyzes ethnic spatial segregation using cellphone data. This allows us to differentiate between place of residence, work, and freetime. We focus on individual pairwise meeting potential (copresence) between ethnic majority and minority groups in a medium-sized bilingual European city (Tallinn, Estonia). We show that segregation in residential and work neighborhoods is rather similar, for both population groups the isolation index ranges between 0.2 and 0.8. However, activities outside of home and work area occur in a virtually non-segregated environment, at least from the spatial point of view. The corresponding isolation index is close to 0.5, the value for that of the random meetings. Our results suggest that physical separation of minorities in segregated neighborhoods may be of less concern than suggested by residential or workplace data only.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Information Systems Frontiers, 2017

Online social networking services entice millions of users to spend hours every day interacting with each other. The focus of this work is to explain the effect that geographic distance has on online social interactions and, simultaneously, to understand the interplay between the social characteristics of friendship ties and their spatial properties. We analyze data from a large-scale online social network, Tuenti, with about 10 million active users: our sample includes user profiles, user home locations and online social interactions among Tuenti members. Our findings support the idea that spatial distance constraints whom users interact with, but not the intensity of their social interactions. Furthermore, friendship ties belonging to denser connected groups tend to arise at shorter spatial distances than social ties established between members belonging to different groups. Finally, we show that our findings mostly do not depend on the age of the users, although younger users seem to be slightly more constrained to shorter geographic distances. Augmenting social structure with geographic information adds a new dimension to social network analysis and a large number of theoretical investigations and practical applications can be pursued for online social systems, with 2 David Laniado et al. many promising outcomes. As the amount of available location-based data is increasing, our findings and results open the door to future possibilities: researchers would benefit from these insights when studying online social services , while developers should be aware of these additional possibilities when building systems and applications related to online social platforms.