Morales Alfredo J, Vavilala Vaibhav, Benito Rosa M, Bar-Yam Yaneer
New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), 277 Broadway Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Grupo de Sistemas Complejos, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, ETSI Agronómica, Alimentaria y de Biosistemas, Avenida Computlense S/N, 28040 Madrid, Spain.
J R Soc Interface. 2017 Mar;14(128). doi: 10.1098/rsif.2016.1048.
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.
社交媒体正在改变全球通信与协调方式，并为研究社会技术领域提供了前所未有的机遇。在此，我们研究了推特上跨多个尺度的全球通信动态模式。观察到的模式背后既有地球的昼夜自转，也有个体间行动应急所需的同步性。我们发现城市地区呈现出一种周期性的收缩和扩张，类似于与社会而非自然周期相关的心跳。不同城市地区有着日常集体活动的特征性信号。我们表明，检测到的差异与一种新出现的全球同步性相一致，这种同步性将世界各地遥远地区的行为联系起来。虽然局部同步是塑造城市集体行为的主要力量，但更大规模的同步化也已开始出现。
