City buzz: Face-to-Face interactions and the urban environment
Image credit: The theory of Dunbar’s number holds that we can only really maintain about 150 connections at once. But is the rule true in today’s world of social media?. BBC Future.
Abstract
We measure face-to-face interactions as the coincidence in space and time of two cellphone users who have previously called each other or who start doing so after the event. We characterize the quantity, quality (network centrality of contacts met), and variety (probability that two interactions are with different contacts) of face-to-face interactions for every individual. We also characterize interactions defined by the different degrees of strength in the call network and differentiate among strong and weak ties. We show how the individual’s experienced density and other features of the urban environment affects these measures of interactions.
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