Mobility and Cellphones
Matéria da BBC, Mobile phones expose human habits, mostra pesquisa coordenada por Barabasi, com mais de 100 mil usuários de telefones celulares e as práticas de mobilidade. O estudo mostra que temos o hábito de andar pelos mesmos lugares, em um raio de no máximo 10 km. Como tenho sugerido, os dispositivos móveis aliam mobilidade física e informacional. No caso, a pesquisa está centrada na mobilidade física e não muito na informacional. Interessante ver também que os hábitos estão atrelados a usos de lugares familiares, mostrando como a relação das tecnologias digitais móveis com processos de espacialização está longe ser ser constitutiva apenas de “não-lugares”, ou ainda de “perda do sentido dos lugares”.
Trechos na matéria.
People’s movements were not as random as predicted
“(…) Most people also move less than 10km on a regular basis, according to the study published in the journal Nature.
(…) The study used data from the website wheresgeorge.com, which allows anyone to track a dollar bill as it circulates through the economy. The site has so far tracked nearly 130 million notes. Studies such as this suggested that humans wander in an apparently random fashion, similar to a so-called “Levy flight” pattern displayed by many foraging animals. However, Dr Gonzalez and her team do not believe this approach gives a complete picture of people’s movements.
(…) The new work tracked 100,000 individuals selected randomly from a sample of more than six million anonymous phone users. Each time a participant made or received a call or text message, the location of the mobile base station relaying the data was recorded. Information was collected for six months. But, according to the researchers, a person’s pattern of movement could be seen in just three.
(…) “The vast majority of people move around over a very short distance – around five to 10km,” explained Professor Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, another member of the team. The results showed that most people’s movements follow a precise mathematical relationship – known as a power law. “That was the first surprise,” he told BBC News. The second surprise, he said, was that the patterns of people’s movements, over short and long distances, were very similar: people tend to return to the same few places over and over again. “Why is this good news?” he asked. “If I were to build a model of how everyone moves in society and they were not similar then it would require six billion different models – each person would require a different description.”(…).