Exploiting all phone media? A multidimensional network analysis of phone users' sociality

摘要

The growing awareness that human communications and social interactions areassuming a stratified structure, due to the availability of multipletechno-communication channels, including online social networks, mobile phonecalls, short messages (SMS) and e-mails, has recently led to the study ofmultidimensional networks, as a step further the classical Social NetworkAnalysis. A few papers have been dedicated to develop the theoretical frameworkto deal with such multiplex networks and to analyze some example ofmultidimensional social networks. In this context we perform the first study ofthe multiplex mobile social network, gathered from the records of both call andtext message activities of millions of users of a large mobile phone operatorover a period of 12 weeks. While social networks constructed from mobile phonedatasets have drawn great attention in recent years, so far studies have dealtwith text message and call data, separately, providing a very partial view ofpeople sociality expressed on phone. Here we analyze how the call and the textmessage dimensions overlap showing how many information about links and nodescould be lost only accounting for a single layer and how users adopt differentmedia channels to interact with their neighborhood.