Segregation and polarization in urban areas

Abstract

Social behaviours emerge from the exchange of information among individuals—constrained by and reciprocally influencing the structure of information flows. The Internet radically transformed communication by democratizing broadcast capabilities and enabling easy and borderless formation of new acquaintances. However, actual information flows are heterogeneous and confined to self-organized echo-chambers. Of central importance to the future of society is understanding how existing physical segregation affects online social fragmentation. Here, we show that the virtual space is a reflection of the geographical space where physical interactions and proximity-based social learning are the main transmitters of ideas. We show that online interactions are segregated by income just as physical interactions are, and that physical separation reflects polarized behaviours beyond culture or politics. Our analysis is consistent with theoretical concepts suggesting polarization is associated with social exposure that reinforces within-group homogenization and between-group differentiation, and they together promote social fragmentation in mirrored physical and virtual spaces.

Social influence and unfollowing accelerate the emergence of echo chambers

“…Echo chambers can also emerge from cognitive mechanisms, such as confirmation bias, when information propagates through centralized channels reaching a large portion of the population [70]. Finally, geographic segregation in urban areas may promote polarization in both physical and online spaces by fracturing the social space of mutual exposure [71]. Our model focuses exclusively on information spreading mechanisms that are characteristic of online social media platforms.…”

Segregated interactions in urban and online space

“…These, together with the increasing availability of data sources resulting from human activities [15,16], have led to an increasing number of studies on modern forms of segregation in spaces beyond residential neighborhoods. Most notably, recent works have shown that there exists clear separation between different ethnic or income groups in everyday activities such as visitation of urban areas [17][18][19][20][21][22][23] or consumption of online information [24][25][26][27][28][29], leading to the so-called "echo chambers" or "filter bubbles" [30].…”

“…While the literature mainly focuses on the limited exposure of certain sociodemographic and wealth groups to the others, the restriction on interactions between these groups [31] remains rather unexplored, possibly due to the lack of large-scale interaction data. The recent work of Morales et al [23] has shown that groups of different income levels have differentiated topics of conversation, and that exposure limited by segregated interactions both offline and online is a key variable for homogeneization. Along a similar line of investigation, and following recent studies using similar data sources in analysing urban mobility and behavior [32][33][34][35], we combine in the present paper largescale credit card transaction and Twitter data sets to study income segregation in daily purchase activities and online communication, thus capturing two explicit interactions in economic and social behavior.…”

Los que no pueden quedarse en casa: movilidad urbana y vulnerabilidad territorial en el área metropolitana de Barcelona durante la pandemia COVID-19

“…En los últimos tiempos, las innovaciones tecnológicas, y en particular la posibilidad de seguir los desplazamientos de la población a través de dispositivos móviles, han permitido nuevos avances en el conocimiento del uso del espacio urbano en relación a variables como los ingresos o la racialización de las personas (Morales, Dong, Bar-Yam & Pentland, 2019;Wang, Phillips, Small & Sampson, 2018).…”