Misery loves company: happiness and communication in the city
Name
document.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
3.58 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
ae2474f0345773c7b49debba2220d14e
Author(s)
Alshamsi, Aamena
Awad, Edmond
Almehrezi, Maryam
Babushkin, Vahan
Chang, Pai-Ju
Shoroye, Zakariyah
Toth, Attila-Peter
Rahwan, Iyad
Date Issued
July 2015
Journal
EPJ Data Science
Publisher
Springer Nature America, Inc
Citation
Alshamsi, Aamena, et al. “Misery Loves Company: Happiness and Communication in the City.” EPJ Data Science 4, 1 (December 2015): 7. © 2015 Alshamsi et al.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The high population density in cities confers many advantages, including improved social interaction and information exchange. However, it is often argued that urban living comes at the expense of reducing happiness. The goal of this research is to shed light on the relationship between urban communication and urban happiness. We analyze geo-located social media posts (tweets) within a major urban center (Milan) to produce a detailed spatial map of urban sentiments. We combine this data with high-resolution mobile communication intensity data among different urban areas. Our results reveal that happy (respectively unhappy) areas preferentially communicate with other areas of their type. This observation constitutes evidence of homophilous communities at the scale of an entire city (Milan), and has implications on interventions that aim to improve urban well-being.
MIT Department
Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1140/EPJDS/S13688-015-0044-2
