IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0089052.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Contraction of Online Response to Major Events

Author

Listed:
  • Michael Szell
  • Sébastian Grauwin
  • Carlo Ratti

Abstract

Quantifying regularities in behavioral dynamics is of crucial interest for understanding collective social events such as panics or political revolutions. With the widespread use of digital communication media it has become possible to study massive data streams of user-created content in which individuals express their sentiments, often towards a specific topic. Here we investigate messages from various online media created in response to major, collectively followed events such as sport tournaments, presidential elections, or a large snow storm. We relate content length and message rate, and find a systematic correlation during events which can be described by a power law relation—the higher the excitation, the shorter the messages. We show that on the one hand this effect can be observed in the behavior of most regular users, and on the other hand is accentuated by the engagement of additional user demographics who only post during phases of high collective activity. Further, we identify the distributions of content lengths as lognormals in line with statistical linguistics, and suggest a phenomenological law for the systematic dependence of the message rate to the lognormal mean parameter. Our measurements have practical implications for the design of micro-blogging and messaging services. In the case of the existing service Twitter, we show that the imposed limit of 140 characters per message currently leads to a substantial fraction of possibly dissatisfying to compose tweets that need to be truncated by their users.

Suggested Citation

  • Michael Szell & Sébastian Grauwin & Carlo Ratti, 2014. "Contraction of Online Response to Major Events," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 9(2), pages 1-9, February.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0089052
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0089052
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0089052
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0089052&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0089052?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Klimek, Peter & Bayer, Werner & Thurner, Stefan, 2011. "The blogosphere as an excitable social medium: Richter’s and Omori’s Law in media coverage," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 390(21), pages 3870-3875.
    2. Michael Szell & Stefan Thurner, 2012. "Social Dynamics In A Large-Scale Online Game," Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 15(06), pages 1-18.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Stanislav Sobolevsky & Izabela Sitko & Remi Tachet des Combes & Bartosz Hawelka & Juan Murillo Arias & Carlo Ratti, 2016. "Cities through the Prism of People’s Spending Behavior," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(2), pages 1-19, February.
    2. Lingjing Wang & Cheng Qian & Philipp Kats & Constantine Kontokosta & Stanislav Sobolevsky, 2017. "Structure of 311 service requests as a signature of urban location," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(10), pages 1-21, October.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Young Bin Kim & Sang Hyeok Lee & Shin Jin Kang & Myung Jin Choi & Jung Lee & Chang Hun Kim, 2015. "Virtual World Currency Value Fluctuation Prediction System Based on User Sentiment Analysis," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(8), pages 1-18, August.
    2. Evangelos Ioannidis & Nikos Varsakelis & Ioannis Antoniou, 2020. "Promoters versus Adversaries of Change: Agent-Based Modeling of Organizational Conflict in Co-Evolving Networks," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 8(12), pages 1-25, December.
    3. Young Bin Kim & Kyeongpil Kang & Jaegul Choo & Shin Jin Kang & TaeHyeong Kim & JaeHo Im & Jong-Hyun Kim & Chang Hun Kim, 2017. "Predicting the Currency Market in Online Gaming via Lexicon-Based Analysis on Its Online Forum," Complexity, Hindawi, vol. 2017, pages 1-10, December.
    4. Maximilian Sadilek & Peter Klimek & Stefan Thurner, 2018. "Asocial balance—how your friends determine your enemies: understanding the co-evolution of friendship and enmity interactions in a virtual world," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 1(1), pages 227-239, January.
    5. Busby, J.S. & Onggo, B.S.S. & Liu, Y., 2016. "Agent-based computational modelling of social risk responses," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 251(3), pages 1029-1042.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0089052. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.