• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, March 6, 2017

Maybe Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of a global community connected by social media isn’t techno-utopian nonsense after all.

Well, it still probably is, but anyway this s pretty cool: a new study claims that social media – in this case Twitter – is helping synchronize patterns of human activity at a very large scale, stretching across numerous time zones and geographic regions.

The study, “Global Patterns of Synchronization in Human Communications” and published in Journal of the Royal Society, analyzed more than 500 million tweets showing the location of millions of users around the world in 2013-2014, and plotted their activity over time in order to uncover larger patterns of usage.

At the local level they were able to trace the average workday to 50 big cities and uncovered a pattern resembling a heartbeat, with peaks and valleys of Twitter activity corresponding to morning commutes, working, evening commutes, evening recreation, sleep, and so on.

In geographic terms tweets “contracted” into city centers and then “expanded” to the city’s periphery, again resembling a heartbeat.

Even more interesting, the researchers identified a new, emerging “global synchrony” coordinating the activity of human beings across very long distances, based around the exchange of information online.

The pattern of synchronization was seen affecting the “Old World” (my term, not theirs) including Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australasia; its strongest manifestation was in a band stretching from Europe to East Asia, as morning activity on Twitter in Europe apparently coincides with afternoon usage in Asia.

This isn’t mere coincidence, according to the authors, but instead reflects new connections enabled by Twitter and other online platforms.

In support of this assertion, they point to the volume of direct messages sent between regions, as well as the number of shared hashtags in tweets sent during these times of day versus other times of day, and show how Twitter activity cycles across widely separated regions “based on the tendency of tweets to trigger other tweets.”

So basically we’re well on our way to becoming the Borg. I for one look forward to joining the collective; see you in the hive mind!