TY - JOUR
T1 - Geographic constraints on social network groups
AU - Onnela, Jukka Pekka
AU - Arbesman, Samuel
AU - González, Marta C.
AU - Barabási, Albert László
AU - Christakis, Nicholas A.
PY - 2011
Y1 - 2011
N2 - Social groups are fundamental building blocks of human societies. While our social interactions have always been constrained by geography, it has been impossible, due to practical difficulties, to evaluate the nature of this restriction on social group structure. We construct a social network of individuals whose most frequent geographical locations are also known. We also classify the individuals into groups according to a community detection algorithm. We study the variation of geographical span for social groups of varying sizes, and explore the relationship between topological positions and geographic positions of their members. We find that small social groups are geographically very tight, but become much more clumped when the group size exceeds about 30 members. Also, we find no correlation between the topological positions and geographic positions of individuals within network communities. These results suggest that spreading processes face distinct structural and spatial constraints.
AB - Social groups are fundamental building blocks of human societies. While our social interactions have always been constrained by geography, it has been impossible, due to practical difficulties, to evaluate the nature of this restriction on social group structure. We construct a social network of individuals whose most frequent geographical locations are also known. We also classify the individuals into groups according to a community detection algorithm. We study the variation of geographical span for social groups of varying sizes, and explore the relationship between topological positions and geographic positions of their members. We find that small social groups are geographically very tight, but become much more clumped when the group size exceeds about 30 members. Also, we find no correlation between the topological positions and geographic positions of individuals within network communities. These results suggest that spreading processes face distinct structural and spatial constraints.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=79953728219&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0016939
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0016939
M3 - Article
C2 - 21483665
AN - SCOPUS:79953728219
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 6
JO - PLoS ONE
JF - PLoS ONE
IS - 4
M1 - e16939
ER -