How Phone Records Correlate to Pace of Life
November 6, 2012
It has often been said that those who dwell in cities live a faster paced life than their country-living counterparts, the MIT Technology Review article, “Phone Call Data Reveals How Pace of Life Accelerates in Cities” is now able to prove it.
According to the article, Markus Schläpfer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge has figured out a way to prove that humans in cities interact more often and with a greater number of other people than those who live in smaller conurbations.
The study is based on 440 million anonymous mobile phone calls made in Portugal over a period of 15 months and almost 8 billion landline calls made in Britain during a single month. What they discovered was, people who live in larger cities not only have more contacts but they also accumulate them faster.
The article states:
“Schläpfer and colleagues say the results imply that during the 15-month observation period an average urban dweller in the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, accumulated about twice as many reciprocated contacts as an average resident of Lixa, a rural town.
‘The results presented here constitute the first extensive empirical evidence of the acceleration of human interactions in cities,’ they say.”
While this is not the first study to argue that people who live in larger cities have a more fast paced life, it is one of the first to have such a large sample size and connect data sets to human interactions. This could very well be the first of many studies.
Jasmine Ashton, November 06, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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