I came across this short paper on new studies that are looking at using mobile telephone records within different cites across the world to understand different cultures, how social networks evolve, and behavioral effects of urbanization (via Harvard’s Complexity and Social Network Blog). It was very interesting to see how we can gather this data, and then measure how people react to different events outside their daily routine. Eagle used the examples of the Red Sox winning the world championship and the subsequent riots in Boston and the Kenyan presidential election outcome and the protests against the results.

Eagle talks about a group of MIT students who embarked on tracking the data (location, physical proximity, and communication) to gain a better understanding of patterns.  The outlier issues were dealt with the examples of the Red Soxs and Kenya.  I think this was the group of students Zeraus referred to in his Long Now Foundation lecture last Friday.  Zeraus connected this sort of research into mining telephone records and travel patterns of individuals in their car to show how easy it is to follow someone without their knowledge and all outside the law.

Eagle also touches upon egocentric social networks and how they are different from normal social networks. Regular incoming students into university/college develop their social network over the first few months, gaining friends and expanding their network ties. Within a few months, this network becomes steady with very little expansion or change. However, when you contrast this to the students starting at business schools you see a different dynamic occurring. Business student’s social networks never stop growing – even after the first few months, the network keeps expanding.  These interactions within social networks of business schools is further supported when you compare phone logs between social networks of normal students and those students in business school.

Business school students have a culture of networking and place high value on the contacts they make in school; these types of values are immediately apparent in their call logs.