Az iWiW földrajza
The geography of the iWiW

Summary/Abstract: How is online social media activity structured in the geographical space? Recent studies have shown that in spite of earlier visions about the“death of distance”, physical proximity is still amajor factor in social tie formation andmaintenance in virtual social networks. Yet, it is unclear, what are the characteristics of the distance dependence in online social networks. In order to explore this issue the complete network of theformer major Hungarian online social network isanalyzed. We find that the distance dependence is weaker for the online social network ties than what was found earlier for phone communicationnetworks. For a further analysis we introduced acoarser granularity: We identified the settlements with the nodes of a network and assigned two kinds of weights to the links between them. When the weights are proportional to the number ofcontacts we observed weakly formed, but spatiallybased modules resemble to the borders of macroregions,the highest level of regionaladministration in the country. If the weights aredefined relative to an uncorrelated null model – with few exceptions –, the next level ofadministrative regions, counties are reflected.

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