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Emergency communications after earthquake reveal social network backbone of important ties

Social networks provide a basis for collective resilience to disasters. Combining the quasi-experimental context of a major earthquake in Ya’an, China, with anonymized mobile telecommunications records regarding 91,839 Ya’an residents, we use initial bursts of postdisaster communications (e.g. choic...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Jia, Jayson S, Li, Yiwei, Liu, Sheng, Christakis, Nicholas A, Jia, Jianmin
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Oxford University Press 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10658761/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/38024411
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad358
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author Jia, Jayson S
Li, Yiwei
Liu, Sheng
Christakis, Nicholas A
Jia, Jianmin
author_facet Jia, Jayson S
Li, Yiwei
Liu, Sheng
Christakis, Nicholas A
Jia, Jianmin
author_sort Jia, Jayson S
collection PubMed
description Social networks provide a basis for collective resilience to disasters. Combining the quasi-experimental context of a major earthquake in Ya’an, China, with anonymized mobile telecommunications records regarding 91,839 Ya’an residents, we use initial bursts of postdisaster communications (e.g. choice of alter, order of calls, and latency) to reveal the “important ties” that form the social network backbone. We find that only 26.8% of important ties activated during the earthquake were the strongest ties during normal times. Many important ties were hitherto latent and weak, only to become persistent and strong after the earthquake. We show that which ties activated during a sudden disaster are best predicted by the interaction of embeddedness and tie strength. Moreover, a backbone of important ties alone (without the inclusion of weak ties ordinarily seen as important to bridge communities) is sufficient to generate a hierarchical structure of social networks that connect a disaster zone's disparate communities.
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spelling pubmed-106587612023-11-02 Emergency communications after earthquake reveal social network backbone of important ties Jia, Jayson S Li, Yiwei Liu, Sheng Christakis, Nicholas A Jia, Jianmin PNAS Nexus Social and Political Sciences Social networks provide a basis for collective resilience to disasters. Combining the quasi-experimental context of a major earthquake in Ya’an, China, with anonymized mobile telecommunications records regarding 91,839 Ya’an residents, we use initial bursts of postdisaster communications (e.g. choice of alter, order of calls, and latency) to reveal the “important ties” that form the social network backbone. We find that only 26.8% of important ties activated during the earthquake were the strongest ties during normal times. Many important ties were hitherto latent and weak, only to become persistent and strong after the earthquake. We show that which ties activated during a sudden disaster are best predicted by the interaction of embeddedness and tie strength. Moreover, a backbone of important ties alone (without the inclusion of weak ties ordinarily seen as important to bridge communities) is sufficient to generate a hierarchical structure of social networks that connect a disaster zone's disparate communities. Oxford University Press 2023-11-02 /pmc/articles/PMC10658761/ /pubmed/38024411 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad358 Text en © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of National Academy of Sciences. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Social and Political Sciences
Jia, Jayson S
Li, Yiwei
Liu, Sheng
Christakis, Nicholas A
Jia, Jianmin
Emergency communications after earthquake reveal social network backbone of important ties
title Emergency communications after earthquake reveal social network backbone of important ties
title_full Emergency communications after earthquake reveal social network backbone of important ties
title_fullStr Emergency communications after earthquake reveal social network backbone of important ties
title_full_unstemmed Emergency communications after earthquake reveal social network backbone of important ties
title_short Emergency communications after earthquake reveal social network backbone of important ties
title_sort emergency communications after earthquake reveal social network backbone of important ties
topic Social and Political Sciences
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10658761/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/38024411
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad358
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