An ecological approach to structural flexibility in online communication systems

Abstract

Human cognitive abilities are limited resources. Today, in the age of cheap information—cheap to produce, to manipulate, to disseminate—this cognitive bottleneck translates into hypercompetition for rewarding outcomes among actors. These incentives push actors to mutualistically interact with specific memes, seeking the virality of their messages. In turn, memes’ chances to persist and spread are subject to changes in the communication environment. In spite of all this complexity, here we show that the underlying architecture of empirical actor-meme information ecosystems evolves into recurring emergent patterns. We then propose an ecology-inspired modelling framework, bringing to light the precise mechanisms causing the observed flexible structural reorganisation. The model predicts—and the data confirm—that users’ struggle for visibility induces a re-equilibration of the network’s mesoscale towards self-similar nested arrangements. Our final microscale insights suggest that flexibility at the structural level is not mirrored at the dynamical one.

Empirical social triad statistics can be explained with dyadic homophylic interactions

“…An obvious extension to the model would be to consider opinions that are randomly drawn from continuous distributions, , with and to derive weighted (and signed) links by modifying the homophily rule to , as proposed in ref. 62 . The model treats contributions to social relations from opinions on different issues equally, while in reality, topics that might influence the relations between two people are generally not of equal importance.…”

A comprehensive benchmark for structural assessment in bipartite networks

“…1 c), and was first introduced by Lewinson et al 36 . This has been found to unfold from an abundance-maximization process 4 on top of a niche-structured population 40,41 , providing a bottom-up perspective on nestedness-modularity, able to trade off stability and diversity in mutualistic communities 39 . Significantly, in-block nestedness has been shown to be the predominant pattern in a significant amount of real plant-animal communities 39 , as well as outside of ecology 66 .…”

“…in-block nestedness, which describes networks compound by weakly interlinked blocks with internal nested character 36,37,38 . This has recently attracted a lot of attention to be predominant in real mutualistic communities 39 and to emerge as a consequence of micro- 40,41 and macroscopic 42 mechanisms.…”

The different structure of economic ecosystems at the scales of companies and countries

“…When this is the case, understanding the structure and dynamics of interactions requires to identify clear boundaries that separate an ecosystem from its surroundings. While this idea and the resulting methods [9][10][11][12] have found promising initial applications in ecological [13,14] and social networks [15,16], they have not yet been applied to economic systems where actors produce and export products. As for these systems, most studies assume that the ecosystem where a country operates is the entire world [17][18][19]: in principle, each country competes with all the others, and all products are considered.…”

“…Building on this dataset, we apply algorithms to statistically validate the presence of modularity, nestedness, and in-block nestedness [11,16] to both the countryproduct and the company-product networks. We find that the same level of nestedness which is present at the country scale is absent when one looks at a national economy of companies as a whole, but re-emerges at the local level, once that the modular structure of the companyproduct network is considered.…”