my recent articles |
| To spread gossip quickly, call your acquaintances, not just your friends |
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27 April 2007, for Nature Network Boston We are all part of networks of people and researchers are just beginning to understand how information spreads through these networks. It has a lot to do with our acquaintances, according to a new study of cell-phone calls. The weaker ties we have with people turn out to be crucial for the rapid transmission of information. Albert-László Barabási at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and colleagues scoured the records of millions of cell-phone calls, determining the strength of ties between two people based on how much time they spent talking to each other.The researchers built a model of this real-world, self-assembled network and then looked at how efficiently information flowed through the network if they severed certain ties but not others. They found that cutting the strongest ties among people had little effect on the ability of information to spread through the whole network. To their surprise, disrupting the weaker ties had more of an effect. When they cut enough weak links, the network fragmented into many isolated groups—something that didn’t happen when they severed strong ties. This means, the researchers suggest, that sending information through the weaker links in the network could help it spread more quickly. In this respect, the network of cell-phone conversations is unlike other well-studied networks, such as the Internet, which would be crippled if strong ties to key central hubs were disrupted. So the next time you discover something juicy and want everyone to know about it, you may want to call up people you haven’t spoken to in years. The work was published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. |