Difference in communication systems explained by balance between edge and node activations

Abstract

Abstract The trade-off between the number of friendships and the closeness of friendships of humans arises due to the limitations of time and cognitive capacities for communication. This trade-off distinguishes asynchronous text communication through the internet (lightweight communication) from face-to-face communication and the social grooming of primates (elaborate communication). This study modelled communication as messaging flows driven by edge and node activations to investigate micro-mechanisms that realise the trade-off law and the differences between the two types of communications. We observed the emergence of five patterns of social structures depending on the strengths of the two types of activations, namely, edge and node activations. The two patterns that show known statistics on empirical studies, such as the trade-off and power-law distributions of closeness, emerged around a threshold between elaborate and lightweight communications, where network structures qualitatively changed. A balance between edge and node activations shifts one pattern (elaborate communication) to another pattern (lightweight communication). Consequently, relation networks that communicate through lightweight communication become less clustered. These results suggest how communication systems construct different social structures, e.g., the impact of popularising the internet.