Goncalves, Bruno, Perra, Nicola ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5559-3064 and Vespignani, Alessandro (2011) Modeling users' activity on twitter networks: Validation of dunbar's number. PloS one, 6 (8). e22656. ISSN 1932-6203 (Print), 1932-6203 (Online) (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0022656)

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Abstract

Microblogging and mobile devices appear to augment human social capabilities, which raises the question whether they remove cognitive or biological constraints on human communication. In this paper we analyze a dataset of Twitter conversations collected across six months involving 1.7 million individuals and test the theoretical cognitive limit on the number of stable social relationships known as Dunbar's number. We find that the data are in agreement with Dunbar's result; users can entertain a maximum of 100–200 stable relationships. Thus, the ‘economy of attention’ is limited in the online world by cognitive and biological constraints as predicted by Dunbar's theory. We propose a simple model for users' behavior that includes finite priority queuing and time resources that reproduces the observed social behavior.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2011 Gonçalves et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Dynamics on networks, Dunbar's number
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Business > Networks and Urban Systems Centre (NUSC) > Centre for Business Network Analysis (CBNA)
Last Modified:	21 Oct 2020 10:05
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/14949

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