Is social capital associated with synchronization in human communication? An analysis of Italian call records and measures of civic engagement
Name
13688_2018_Article_152.pdf
Size
2.8 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
09fe1f6458baf416ca88382da4d28c8f
Author(s)
Mamei, Marco
Pancotto, Francesca
De Nadai, Marco
Lepri, Bruno
Vescovi, Michele
Zambonelli, Franco
Pentland, Alex Paul
Date Issued
July 2018
Journal
EPJ Data Science
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Citation
Mamei, Marco et al. "Is social capital associated with synchronization in human communication? An analysis of Italian call records and measures of civic engagement." EPJ Data Science 2018, 7 (July 2018): 25 © 2018 The Author(s)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Social capital has been studied in economics, sociology and political science as one of the key elements that promote the development of modern societies. It can be defined as the source of capital that facilitates cooperation through shared social norms. In this work, we investigate whether and to what extent synchronization aspects of mobile communication patterns are associated with social capital metrics. Interestingly, our results show that our synchronization-based approach well correlates with existing social capital metrics (i.e., Referendum turnout, Blood donations, and Association density), being also able to characterize the different role played by high synchronization within a close proximity-based community and high synchronization among different communities. Hence, the proposed approach can provide timely, effective analysis at a limited cost over a large territory.
MIT Department
Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-018-0152-x
