A draft version of my paper The Spatial Structure of Transnational Human Activity is now available online in the arXiv.
| Starting from conflictive predictions of hitherto disconnected debates in the natural and social sciences, this paper contains the – to my knowledge – first encompassing analysis of the spatial structure of human activity beyond nation-state borders worldwide (a) across eight types of mobility and communication and (b) in its development over time. It is shown that contrary to what popular terms like “death of distance” and “end of geography” suggest, the spatial structure of transnational human activity is still heavily shaped by physical space. I demonstrate that the relation between activity and distance follows a specific mathematical pattern that can also be found in the movements of many animal species as well as local-scale human motion: Lévy flights with heavy tails that obey power laws. This pattern is also shown to remain remarkably stable over time. The figure on the right shows what a Lévy flight typically looks like: the path of a walker who takes many small and few long steps and changes his direction randomly in between. |  A Lévy flight |
The map below shows exemplarily one type of communication that is analyzed in the paper: transnational Facebook friendships. The black lines denote the country pairs with the highest number of Facebook friendships. For the purposes of this study, they constitute the equivalent of the steps the random walker takes in the Lévy flight figure above. (NB: The Facebook data was obtained from an interactive graph, converted into a network matrix and graphically mapped using Manish Nag's fantastic free software SONOMA).
A Map of Transnational Facebook Friendships
The third figure below shows the spatial structure of these Facebook friendships. The x-axis shows the distance (in km) and the y-axis states the probability of a transnational Facebook friendship to occur. The blue circles denote binned observations and the black line is a fitted power-law curve. The inset shows the same observations on logarithmic axes, on which the power-law curve forms a straight line.
 The Spatial Structure of Transnational Facebook Friendships | As both the graph itself and the goodness-of-fit measure R² show, the power-law fits the observations almost perfectly. In the logged version, the observations cluster closely around the power-law line and the R²=.968 is only slightly below the perfect fit of R²=1. This finding (which also holds for other types of mobility and communication under study) is clearly at odds with the common notion of a "death of distance" or an "end of geography" in structuring social relations. For more details just have a look at the paper. |
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