Impact of Human Activity Patterns on the Dynamics of Information Diffusion Articles uri icon

authors

  • MORO EGIDO, ESTEBAN
  • Iribarren, Jose Luis

publication date

  • July 2009

start page

  • 38702

issue

  • 3

volume

  • 103

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 0031-9007

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1079-7114

abstract

  • We study the impact of human activity patterns on information diffusion. To this end we ran a viral email experiment involving 31 183 individuals in which we were able to track a specific piece of information through the social network. We found that, contrary to traditional models, information travels at an unexpectedly slow pace. By using a branching model which accurately describes the experiment, we show that the large heterogeneity found in the response time is responsible for the slow dynamics of information at the collective level. Given the generality of our result, we discuss the important implications of this finding while modeling human dynamical collective phenomena.