As the clock ticks out like a dripping faucet
If I call you, will you call back? The study of reciprocity between mobile phone users reveals surprising insights about the flow of information in society.
What do your mobile phone habits say about you? Probably more than you might imagine.
At least, that’s the suggestion from Lauri Kovanen and pals at the Aalto University School of Science and Technology, Finland. These guys have studied the 350 million calls made by 5.3 million customers over an unnamed mobile phone network during a period of 18 weeks. The primary question they ask is whether mobile phone calls are mutually reciprocated: in other words, does somebody who calls another individual receive in return as many calls as he or she makes, a phenomenon known as reciprocity.
Mobile phone calls are a particularly good way to study reciprocity because they are directed in a way that sms messages and email are not. In a mobile phone call, the caller initiates the conversation and then both parties invest a certain amount of time in the event. But afterwards there is usually no immediate reason for the recipient to call back. So it’s clear who initiated the event.
But SMS messages or e-mails are entirely different: here a conversation usually means sending a sequence of reciprocated messages and this makes it much more difficult to study reciprocity by simply counting the number of messages.
