Human behavior as recorded on the web

Abstract

Internet and the the web infrastructure now bring to us an unprecedented amount of information and, at the same time, they are recording so much of our life that we are starting to learn much about ourselves. In this talk we use three examples to demonstrate how the web has changed the way we look at ourselves and learn. The first is word-of-mouth spreading. Before the advent of the Internet, there existedvery few direct methodologies to track word-of-mouth spreading of information. Now online social networking services (OSNs) play the role of a virtual bulleting board where all our exchanges are logged. The second is limit on our cognitive capacity. Dunbar's number represents "a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships" according to Wikipedia. Macroscopic analysis of the online interaction presents the existence of such a limit empirically. Last, relationship dissolution is not a common phenomenon nor easy to capture. Unfollow on Twitter is a feature that allows users to end following other users. The interpretation of unfollow would depend on how one interprets Twitter, as a social network or as a news medium; yet it does bring an interesing insight on how and why we end an online relationship. We conclude this talk with directions for future work.