Urban Social Media Inequality: Definition, Measurements, and Application

📝 Abstract

Social media content shared today in cities, such as Instagram images, their tags and descriptions, is the key form of contemporary city life. It tells people where activities and locations that interest them are and it allows them to share their urban experiences and self-representations. Therefore, any analysis of urban structures and cultures needs to consider social media activity. In our paper, we introduce the novel concept of social media inequality. This concept allows us to quantitatively compare patterns in social media activities between parts of a city, a number of cities, or any other spatial areas. We define this concept using an analogy with the concept of economic inequality. Economic inequality indicates how some economic characteristics or material resources, such as income, wealth or consumption are distributed in a city, country or between countries. Accordingly, we can define social media inequality as the measure of the distribution of characteristics from social media content shared in a particular geographic area or between areas. An example of such characteristics is the number of photos shared by all users of a social network such as Instagram in a given city or city area, or the content of these photos. We propose that the standard inequality measures used in other disciplines, such as the Gini coefficient, can also be used to characterize social media inequality. To test our ideas, we use a dataset of 7,442,454 public geo-coded Instagram images shared in Manhattan during five months (March-July) in 2014, and also selected data for 287 Census tracts in Manhattan. We compare patterns in Instagram sharing for locals and for visitors for all tracts, and also for hours in a 24-hour cycle. We also look at relations between social media inequality and socio-economic inequality using selected indicators for Census tracts.

💡 Analysis

Social media content shared today in cities, such as Instagram images, their tags and descriptions, is the key form of contemporary city life. It tells people where activities and locations that interest them are and it allows them to share their urban experiences and self-representations. Therefore, any analysis of urban structures and cultures needs to consider social media activity. In our paper, we introduce the novel concept of social media inequality. This concept allows us to quantitatively compare patterns in social media activities between parts of a city, a number of cities, or any other spatial areas. We define this concept using an analogy with the concept of economic inequality. Economic inequality indicates how some economic characteristics or material resources, such as income, wealth or consumption are distributed in a city, country or between countries. Accordingly, we can define social media inequality as the measure of the distribution of characteristics from social media content shared in a particular geographic area or between areas. An example of such characteristics is the number of photos shared by all users of a social network such as Instagram in a given city or city area, or the content of these photos. We propose that the standard inequality measures used in other disciplines, such as the Gini coefficient, can also be used to characterize social media inequality. To test our ideas, we use a dataset of 7,442,454 public geo-coded Instagram images shared in Manhattan during five months (March-July) in 2014, and also selected data for 287 Census tracts in Manhattan. We compare patterns in Instagram sharing for locals and for visitors for all tracts, and also for hours in a 24-hour cycle. We also look at relations between social media inequality and socio-economic inequality using selected indicators for Census tracts.

📄 Content

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Urban Social Media Inequality:
Definition, Measurements, and
Application

Agustin Indaco (Economics, The Graduate Center, City University of New York) Lev Manovich (Computer Science, The Graduate Center, City University of New York)

Keywords:

social media inequality, Instagram, Gini coefficient, science of cities, urban analytics, urban sci- ence

Abstract:

Social media content shared today in cities, such as Instagram images, their tags and descriptions, is the key form of contemporary city life. It tells people where activities and locations that interest them are and it allows them to share their urban experiences and self-representations. Therefore, any analysis of urban structures and cultures needs to consider social media activity. In our paper, we introduce the novel con- cept of social media inequality. This concept allows us to quantitatively compare patterns in social media activities between parts of a city, a number of cities, or any other spatial areas.

We define this concept using an analogy with the concept of economic inequality. Economic inequality indicates how some economic characteristics or material resources, such as income, wealth or consump- tion are distributed in a city, country or between countries. Accordingly, we can define social media ine- quality as the measure of the distribution of characteristics from social media content shared in a particu- lar geographic area or between areas. An example of such characteristics is the number of photos shared by all users of a social network such as Instagram in a given city or city area, or the content of these pho- tos.

We propose that the standard inequality measures used in other disciplines, such as the Gini coefficient, can also be used to characterize social media inequality. To test our ideas, we use a dataset of 7,442,454 public geo-coded Instagram images shared in Manhattan during five months (March-July) in 2014, and also selected data for 287 Census tracts in Manhattan. We compare patterns in Instagram sharing for lo- cals and for visitors for all tracts, and also for hours in a 24-hour cycle. We also look at relations between social media inequality and socio-economic inequality using selected indicators for Census tracts.

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Fig. 1 and fig. 2. 3

Introduction

Social media content shared today in cities, such as Instagram images, their tags and descrip- tions, is the key form of contemporary city life. It tells people where activities and locations that interest them are and it allows them to share their urban experiences and self-representations. Social media also has become one of the most important representations of city life to both its residents and the outside world. One can argue that any city today is as much the media content shared in that city on social networks as its infrastructure and economic activities.

For these reasons, any analysis of urban structures and cultures needs to consider social media activity and content. While the industry developed many concepts and measurement tools to analyze social media, these concepts and tools were not developed for comparative urban analy- sis. Therefore, we need to develop our own concepts that bridge the perspectives of urban stud- ies and design and quantitative analysis of social networks that use computational methods and “big data.”

In the last few years, one of the most frequently discussed public issues has been the rise in in- come inequality (Stiglitz, 2012; Piketty, 2014; Atkinson, 2015). But inequality does not only refer to distribution of income. It is a more general concept, and it has been used for decades in a number of academic disciplines besides economics, such as urban planning, sociology, educa- tion, engineering, and ecology. The quantitative measurement of inequality allows researchers to characterize a set of numbers or compare multiple sets, regardless of what the data repre- sents. In addition to income inequality, we can measure inequality in wealth, education levels, social well-being, and numerous other social characteristics.

In our paper, we introduce the novel concept of social media inequality. We define this concept using an analogy with the concept of economic inequality. Economic inequality refers to how some economic characteristics or material resources, such as income, wealth or consumption are distributed in a city, country or between countries (Ray, 1998; Milanovic, 2007; OECD, 2011). Accordingly, we can define social media inequality as the measure of the distribution of characteristics from social media content shared in a particular geographic area or between areas.

An example of such characteristics is the number of photos shared by all users of a social net- work such as Instagram in a given city or city area. Another example is the number of hashtags – how many hashtags users added to the photos, and how many of these

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