Geographies of an online social network

How is online social media activity structured in the geographical space? Recent studies have shown that in spite of earlier visions about the “death of distance”, physical proximity is still a major factor in social tie formation and maintenance in virtual social networks. Yet, it is unclear, what are the characteristics of the distance dependence in online social networks. In order to explore this issue the complete network of the former major Hungarian online social network is analyzed. We find that the distance dependence is weaker for the online social network ties than what was found earlier for phone communication networks. For a further analysis we introduced a coarser granularity: We identified the settlements with the nodes of a network and assigned two kinds of weights to the links between them. When the weights are proportional to the number of contacts we observed weakly formed, but spatially based modules resemble to the borders of macro-regions, the highest level of regio...在线社交媒体活动在地理空间中具有何种结构特征？近期研究表明，尽管早期曾存在「距离之死（death of distance）」的畅想，但实体邻近性仍是虚拟社交网络中社会纽带形成与维系的核心影响因素。然而，当前学界尚未明确在线社交网络中距离依赖性的具体特征。为探究该问题，本研究对匈牙利此前主流在线社交网络的全量网络结构展开分析。研究发现，在线社交网络纽带的距离依赖性，弱于此前针对电话通信网络所观测到的结果。为开展进一步分析，我们采用了更粗的粒度划分方式：将网络节点映射至对应的聚居区域，并为区域间的连接赋予两类权重。当权重与互动频次成正比时，我们观测到虽结构松散但以空间为基础的模块，其边界与宏观区域的边界存在相似性，即最高层级的区域……