"It Flows Narrow and Deep"

Ubiwar reports on a remarkable new National Academy of Science (NAS) study that explores the real operational characteristics of web-based social networks.  The study challenges the fundamental assumptions of how information is shared in social networks.  According to the abstract:

Here, we trace these types of large-scale information-spreading processes at a person-by-person level using methods to reconstruct the propagation of massively circulated Internet chain letters, and from these observations we propose a new set of principles for how such processes work. We focus in particular on two such chain letters, which exhibit tree-like patterns of dissemination that are quite similar to each other but are initially in conflict with the intuitive picture of how information spreads in these settings. Rather than expanding to many individuals in a few steps, the trees are very narrow and continue reaching people several hundred levels deep. We describe a mathematical model that produces trees with this characteristic structure, grounded fundamentally in the observations that social networks are highly clustered and that information can take widely varying amounts of time to traverse different edges in the network. The simple structure of the model, and the fact that it is based on earlier empirical studies of human response times, thus suggests a possible basis for this narrow and deeply reaching style of information transmission in the local dynamics of communication within highly clustered social networks.

Comments

[ubiwar]

It's a fascinating piece of work, I agree. It tends to confirm a completely non-empirical hunch I've had for a while - that information flows are not necessarily horizontal. It explains why we don't all get the same internet junk in rapid succession, for example. Information doesn't always take both the left and the right paths, it seems.