Abstract
Human interaction networks inferred from country-wide telephone activity recordings were recently used to redraw political maps by projecting their topological partitions into geographical space. The results showed remarkable spatial cohesiveness of the network communities and a significant overlap between the redrawn and the administrative borders. Here we present a similar analysis based on one of the most popular online social networks represented by the ties between more than 5.8 million of its geo-located users. The worldwide coverage of their measured activity allowed us to analyze the large-scale regional subgraphs of entire continents and an extensive set of examples for single countries. We present results for North and South America, Europe and Asia. In our analysis we used the well-established method of modularity clustering after an aggregation of the individual links into a weighted graph connecting equal-area geographical pixels. Our results show fingerprints of both of the opposing forces of dividing local conflicts and of uniting cross-cultural trends of globalization.
Highlights
It is almost a truism that the End of History, even if it exists, appears to be much farther away from our present than it did at the beginning of the 1990’s [1]
Global cultural trends and news propagate through the various channels of international communication and PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone
The aim of this paper is to present our findings on the spatial structure of an extensive set of large and medium scale regional communication networks
Summary
It is almost a truism that the End of History, even if it exists, appears to be much farther away from our present than it did at the beginning of the 1990’s [1]. After the falling of the Soviet Union the optimistic atmosphere, shared by many scholars, has been immediately challenged by local conflicts, like the Yugoslav Wars. With on-going geopolitical crises the concept of the Clash of Civilizations [2] or other less peaceful scenarios became more realistic than ever before in the past of the post-Cold War era. Globalization tries to—in a restricted sense—unify the economic world. By the way economy affects the life of people, globalization is an economic phenomenon, but it has serious political and cultural aspects too [3], [4]. Global cultural trends and news propagate through the various channels of international communication and PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0126713. Global cultural trends and news propagate through the various channels of international communication and PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0126713 May 20, 2015
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