Why Society is a Complex Matter by Ball Philip

Author:Ball, Philip
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Published: 2012-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

Monitoring mass human movements directly, rather than by proxies of uncertain representativeness, is becoming ever easier because we carry with us wireless detectors of our location, such as mobile phones. Telecommunications companies collect data about where individual calls were made, in part to monitor the completeness of their network coverage but also because the location of the user’s nearest mobile-network tower can affect billing. Some companies make this anonymous data available for research purposes. A study of 100,000 people tracked via their mobile phones over six months showed that individuals’ movements are generally highly predictable, and that we regularly return to a few locations and spend most of our time there. What’s more, we typically make phone calls in a ‘bursty’ fashion – not spaced out evenly over time, but in groups interspersed with periods of inactivity. This seems to be a very common pattern in human behaviour, seen also for example in the way we respond to letters or emails.

Such phone-tracking data show that, while people do seem to follow Lévy-flight trajectories, there is a lot of person-to-person variation in their precise characteristics: we each have our own ‘signature’ variation on the same basic pattern. People who are closely linked in a social network – who call each other frequently – also show similar patterns of mobility: they tend to frequent the same places. And the chance of forming a new link between two nodes in a social network is considerably greater if those nodes are already close together, separated by only a few steps – or equivalently, if they display similar mobility trajectories. Thus, studying mobile-phone data can not only tell us about people’s physical movements in space but can also serve as a proxy for uncovering social network structures. This could be useful, not least for epidemiological modeling, but it also has a surprising and sobering implication from the perspective of privacy: purely by virtue of how we move around, we unwittingly encode and broadcast information about who we are and who we know.

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