Re: <nettime> How Tinder helped to beat May & could win the White

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

I think what social media are really good at is to produce "bursts"
of activity. Things flair up, reach a lot of people, and then die
out quite quickly. The idea that these bursts would, over time,
consolidate into something more structurally coherent (other than
companies that provide the infrastructure) has been wrong, at least so
far. This is probably not a co-incidence.

So, what social media might be really good at is to instigate bursty
political activity, like joining a demonstration, or registering
to vote. But bursty activity is only a relatively small aspect of
political work. So, challenge seems to be to recalibrate the bursty
and the long-term dynamics.

I think of this on the context of a new paper on the "Temporal
patterns behind the strength of persistent ties"

Henry Navarro, Giovanna Miritello, Arturo Canales, Esteban Moro
(Submitted on 19 Jun 2017)

    Social networks are made out of strong and weak ties having very
different structural and dynamical properties. But, what features of
human interaction build a strong tie? Here we approach this question
from an practical way by finding what are the properties of social
interactions that make ties more persistent and thus stronger to
maintain social interactions in the future. Using a large longitudinal
mobile phone database we build a predictive model of tie persistence
based on intensity, intimacy, structural and temporal patterns
of social interaction. While our results confirm that structural
(embeddedness) and intensity (number of calls) are correlated with tie
persistence, we find that temporal features of communication events
are better and more efficient predictors for tie persistence.

     Specifically, although communication within ties is always bursty
we find that ties that are more bursty than the average are more
likely to decay, signaling that tie strength is not only reflected in
the intensity or topology of the network, but also on how individuals
distribute time or attention across their relationships.

     We also found that stable relationships have and require a
constant rhythm and if communication is halted for more than 8 times
the previous communication frequency, most likely the tie will decay.
Our results not only are important to understand the strength of
social relationships but also to unveil the entanglement between the
different temporal scales in networks, from microscopic tie burstiness
and rhythm to macroscopic network evolution.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.06188

On 2017-06-24 07:00, Patrice Riemens wrote:
> 
> An upbeat story, yet for me at least, it has a feel of tech solutionism 
> to it. How apps and bots, and long distance 'matches' are substituting 
> for communities on the ground ...
> 
> How Tinder Could Take Back the White House
> 
> By YAara Rodrigues Fowler and Charlotte Goodman, NYT, June 22, 2017
> 
> original t:
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/opinion/how-tinder-could-take-back-the-white-house.html>


 
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