Proximity-driven motives in the evolution of an online social network

Abstract

Although early theoretical works dealing with the effects of information communication technologies on people’s relation to spatiality claim that distance is no longer important in the information age, there is a growing number of empirical results stressing on the contrary the importance of geographical factors. In the era of big data now we have the chance to give more insights on the geography of the internet-related social processes, since there are unprecedentedly large enough samples to analyse social behaviour as well as to understand the changing role of geography. Accordingly, the following paper is focusing on the geographical analysis of a nowadays very popular topic: the online social networks. Examples of iWiW, the largest Hungarian social media site, are applied to show that such networks are evolving and are structured not independently of spatial constraints. The paper attempts to present many proximity-driven characteristics of this network starting from distance-based examples of space-time evolution and with examples of proximity-focused statistical analysis of the spatial structure. The calculations highlighted that—although it was changing in time—proximity-driven processes have been predominant in city-to-city diffusion, especially when dealing with intracity spreading, but also at cases of short distance neighbourhood diffusion. Calculations by comparing factors like the average strength of connectivity, population size and average relative distance rates of cities also confirmed that proximity had an influence on the network structure.