Global patterns of synchronization in human communications

Abstract

Social media are transforming global communication and coordination and provide unprecedented opportunities for studying socio-technical domains. Here we study global dynamical patterns of communication on Twitter across many scales. Underlying the observed patterns is both the diurnal rotation of the Earth, day and night, and the synchrony required for contingency of actions between individuals. We find that urban areas show a cyclic contraction and expansion that resembles heartbeats linked to social rather than natural cycles. Different urban areas have characteristic signatures of daily collective activities. We show that the differences detected are consistent with a new emergent global synchrony that couples behaviour in distant regions across the world. Although local synchrony is the major force that shapes the collective behaviour in cities, a larger-scale synchronization is beginning to occur.

Recurrent Patterns of User Behavior in Different Electoral Campaigns: A Twitter Analysis of the Spanish General Elections of 2015 and 2016

“…This way we capture full human activity cycles. This approach is based on a work by Morales et al [24], where human synchronization is studied at several scales, finding strong periodicities linked to day-night and social cycles as well as a developing global synchronization that adds a new perspective to the phenomenon of globalization. On the other hand, we have built aggregated networks for the 15 days of electoral campaign plus the next three days (before election, election, and after election).…”

Quantum Cognitive Triad. Semantic Geometry of Context Representation

“…Outside of special conditions of this kind social phenomena elude classical descriptions. As information connectivity of humanity establishes global cognitive and behavioral coherence [Grandpierre, 1997, Morales et al, 2017, social phenomena move from classical to quantum (wave-like [Orefice et al, 2009]) domain [Bouchaud, 2008, Plikynas, 2010, Haven, 2015, Khrennikov, 2018. Methodology of quantum modeling is therefore expected to form the basis for a new-age science of human-centered phenomena of both individual and collective scale [Widdows and Bruza, 2007].…”

Spatio-temporal variations in the urban rhythm: the travelling waves of crime

“…In addition to displaying scaling regularity, urban social interactions are known to exhibit temporal regularity or rhythms of activity 22,23 . These rhythms appear to result from the interplay between human circadian and the mobility patterns of city inhabitants 24 .…”