WASHINGTON: People are more likely to interact with those living nearby, despite the availability of social networks and apps like WhatsApp and Skype that help one stay connected to friends across the globe, a study has found.
That is one of the major outcomes of an expansive, 16-month study of more than 51 million geo-tagged tweets generated by more than 1.7 million Twitter users across the US.
"You can Skype and Zoom with anyone. People can buy anything they want from Amazon. It doesn't matter the location," said Ming-Hsiang Tsou, a professor at San Diego State University (SDSU) in the US.
With the rise of the Internet and the new era of globalisation, some have argued that the world is flat - geography is dead.
"But we disagree with that. The concept of distance is not dissolved, but it has shifted," Tsou said.
The team collected tweets between November 2015 and January 2016.
They focused on the online and real space interactions of users in four major cities: Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and New York.
Spatial interactions generally include trips, telephone calls and emails, and the team broadened the definition to include any type of connection between places, including people viewing social media messages of those living in other places and "following" others online.
"When we are analysing social media, or big data, while also handling the geospatial information, we can more precisely analyze data from a regional perspective," Tsou said.
With the massive database of tweets prepared for analysis, the team considered three main issues: how people followed one another, the awareness they had of the cities of their followers and whether they travelled to cities where their followers were located.
To compare interactions online versus those in real space, the team studied origins and travel destinations of Twitter users, producing detailed data maps to easily visualise findings.
The team found that Twitter users averaged 90 per cent of their tweets in a single city during the 16-month study period - most often their home city.
In real space, and despite some variation, the team also found that users in all states tended to follow others and have followers well beyond their immediate geographic region - often nationwide.
However, people are far less likely to have a strong awareness of or even give mention to the cities of their faraway followers.
"We know that people are communicating much more frequently with nearby people than those who are far away," said Su Yeon Han from SDSU, who led the study.
"Even in cyberspace, the same thing is very likely to happen because, in many cases, people get to know each other in real space and also communicate with the same people online," said Han.