By analysing the tweets of the most connected people we observed symptoms propagating through the social network. When they are sick, people tweet about their illness and people like Sue and Alice who have high connectivity within their network are more vulnerable to viral infections. We found not only that the paradox was even stronger in the social media world, but that it could be applied in quite a few unexpected scenarios.įor example, we used it to combat the spread of contagious diseases. So back in 2010 we decided to download and analyse all these data and see if the Friendship Paradox would hold in the social media hyper-connected world. But today is different from the 90s: there are millions of people publicly tweeting many times every day: about what they are doing about where they are doing it about hot topics of the moment such as the latest celebrity antics, or the threat of bad weather. Until recently the Friendship Paradox was considered a theoretical finding, a curiosity if you may. Interestingly, this social phenomenon has surprising, wide-ranging uses. This network shows that only the highly connected students like Sue and Alice have more friends than their friends do -the overwhelming majority of the rest of us do not, and that’s why the experience the Friendship Paradox firsthand. The number beside each name is her number of friends, and the number in parentheses beside each name is the mean number of friends of her friends. The figure below (adapted from Feld’s paper) shows an example of a small friendship network from a high school. Simply put it says: “your friends have, statistically speaking, more friends than you do.” It’s a consequence of the mathematical properties of the social networks in which we live. It’s a manifestation of the ‘ Friendship Paradox’, a phenomenon first observed by the sociologist Scott L Feld in 1991. If it’s any consolation, they do, and it’s not your fault. Do you ever feel that most of your friends are more socially connected than you? Do they seem to learn about all the cool new hangouts - bars, cafes, pop-up shops, etc - before you do?
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