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An analysis of Twitter data from the United States shows that the use of social media largely reflects daily work schedules and school calendars. The data reflects the magnitude of the "social jet lag" caused when social demands force people to wake up much earlier than their biological rhythms would like.
In a new study published on November 15 in Current biology, researchers at the University of Chicago analyzed the Twitter activity of more than 246,000 users from 2012 to 2013 to search for daily usage patterns. The tweets were tagged with geographic location data of more than 1,500 counties in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The data serves as a proxy for people's sleep and waking hours, a public record of sorts that indicates when a person is awake and still uses Twitter.
In the United States, there is a daily slowdown of tweets at night when most people go to bed. The researchers found that this nocturnal lull took weekends off the days of the week, a phenomenon they call the "social jet lag of Twitter." The magnitude of this lag, which is the time that a person spends later or sleeps on the weekend. , varies across the country and with the seasons. The west coast is experiencing less social jet lag on Twitter than the rest of the United States. Most countries see the largest jet lag in February and the lowest in June or July.
The study also shows that these changes tend to coincide with relaxed social schedules due to school holidays and summer holidays, from kindergarten to grade 12, rather than seasonal effects on the amount of light of the day. Without early school leaving and no bus schedules to dictate waking hours, parents and students tend to sleep – and start tweeting – later in the day, probably more in tune with their natural circadian rhythms.
"We started the study hoping that it would be a solar or seasonal effect, namely that your internal clock would change during the summer and that this would result in a decrease of social jet lag, "said Aaron Dinner, Ph.D., professor of chemistry, senior authors of the study. "But in fact, that's not what we found. People get up later in the summer because their social constraints are relaxed. Weekend behavior – and presumably a person's biological clock – does not change much during the year in most counties. "
Lack of sleep and inadequate sleep schedules have been linked to many health problems, including obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Twitter activity patterns were also tracked with obesity rates. Counties with higher levels of social jet lag were correlated with higher rates of obesity. Information on sleep schedules is also correlated with data from conventional sleep studies, in which people report how much sleep they get at night.
"I was impressed by all that we could learn from this purely public dataset that was not at all intended to inform you about sleep," said Michael Rust, Ph.D., associate professor of genetics molecular, cell biology and physics and the other main author of the study. "In fact, we could rediscover elements such as the correlation with obesity or time zone-based social time-lag levels, which have been found in other studies in which people have devised inquiries to ask questions directly about sleep. "
For Dinner, Rust and their colleagues, the study of social media activity is far from their usual work in chemistry, cell biology and physics. Rust's group normally studies cyanobacteria, a type of bacterium that generates energy through photosynthesis as a plant. Like many organisms, cyanobacteria have a circadian clock, a biological rhythm that synchronizes activity such as rest and growth to daily changes of the 24-hour day.
In a 2015 study, Rust showed how circadian clocks of these bacteria are determined by metabolism and not by daylight. Eugene Leypunskiy, a graduate student who led the new study on Twitter, looked at how these photosynthetic bacteria react to seasonal changes. Bacteria tend to change their activity depending on the season, which has led the team to wonder if these same patterns apply to humans.
Although this is not the first scientific study to examine the patterns of activity revealed by Twitter's public data, it is only a snapshot of a single period in the world. time. From 2012 to 2013, at the time of data collection, geolocation was enabled by default in Twitter applications. This is no longer the case, which means there are fewer public tweets tagged with location data.
Since then, Twitter has also gone from a platform where people tweeted about daily details of their personal lives to an incessant fire of information. Because of these changes, the use of Twitter is perhaps not the best proxy for sleep schedules today, but the study suggests other models. may emerge from electronic data.
"What's more exciting is the ability to use devices where a user chooses to provide data, such as a smart watch or fitness tracker," said Rust. "If we could have access to the kind of data that you can follow a person over time and see how the rhythms of his behavior change, you may be able to provide him with very useful information about his biological clock."
More information:
"The geographically resolved rhythms of using Twitter reveal social pressures on patterns of daily activity," Current biology (2018). DOI: 10.1016 / j.cub.2018.10.016, https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)31345-9
An analysis of Twitter data from the United States shows that the use of social media largely reflects daily work schedules and school calendars. The data reflects the magnitude of the "social jet lag" caused when social demands force people to wake up much earlier than their biological rhythms would like.
In a new study published on November 15 in Current biology, researchers at the University of Chicago analyzed the Twitter activity of more than 246,000 users from 2012 to 2013 to search for daily usage patterns. The tweets were tagged with geographic location data of more than 1,500 counties in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The data serves as a proxy for people's sleep and waking hours, a public record of sorts that indicates when a person is awake and still uses Twitter.
In the United States, there is a daily slowdown of tweets at night when most people go to bed. The researchers found that this nocturnal lull took weekends off the days of the week, a phenomenon they call the "social jet lag of Twitter." The magnitude of this lag, which is the time that a person spends later or sleeps on the weekend. , varies across the country and with the seasons. The west coast is experiencing less social jet lag on Twitter than the rest of the United States. Most countries see the largest jet lag in February and the lowest in June or July.
The study also shows that these changes tend to coincide with relaxed social schedules due to school holidays and summer holidays, from kindergarten to grade 12, rather than seasonal effects on the amount of light of the day. Without early school leaving and no bus schedules to dictate waking hours, parents and students tend to sleep – and start tweeting – later in the day, probably more in tune with their natural circadian rhythms.
"We started the study hoping that it would be a solar or seasonal effect, namely that your internal clock would change during the summer and that this would result in a decrease of social jet lag, "said Aaron Dinner, Ph.D., professor of chemistry, senior authors of the study. "But in fact, that's not what we found. People get up later in the summer because their social constraints are relaxed. Weekend behavior – and presumably a person's biological clock – does not change much during the year in most counties. "
Lack of sleep and inadequate sleep schedules have been linked to many health problems, including obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Twitter activity patterns were also tracked with obesity rates. Counties with higher levels of social jet lag were correlated with higher rates of obesity. Information on sleep schedules is also correlated with data from conventional sleep studies, in which people report how much sleep they get at night.
"I was impressed by all that we could learn from this purely public dataset that was not at all intended to inform you about sleep," said Michael Rust, Ph.D., associate professor of genetics molecular, cell biology and physics and the other main author of the study. "In fact, we could rediscover elements such as the correlation with obesity or time zone-based social time-lag levels, which have been found in other studies in which people have devised inquiries to ask questions directly about sleep. "
For Dinner, Rust and their colleagues, the study of social media activity is far from their usual work in chemistry, cell biology and physics. Rust's group normally studies cyanobacteria, a type of bacterium that generates energy through photosynthesis as a plant. Like many organisms, cyanobacteria have a circadian clock, a biological rhythm that synchronizes activity such as rest and growth to daily changes of the 24-hour day.
In a 2015 study, Rust showed how circadian clocks of these bacteria are determined by metabolism and not by daylight. Eugene Leypunskiy, a graduate student who led the new study on Twitter, looked at how these photosynthetic bacteria react to seasonal changes. Bacteria tend to change their activity depending on the season, which has led the team to wonder if these same patterns apply to humans.
Although this is not the first scientific study to examine the patterns of activity revealed by Twitter's public data, it is only a snapshot of a single period in the world. time. From 2012 to 2013, at the time of data collection, geolocation was enabled by default in Twitter applications. This is no longer the case, which means there are fewer public tweets tagged with location data.
Since then, Twitter has also gone from a platform where people tweeted about daily details of their personal lives to an incessant fire of information. Because of these changes, the use of Twitter is perhaps not the best proxy for sleep schedules today, but the study suggests other models. may emerge from electronic data.
"What's more exciting is the ability to use devices where a user chooses to provide data, such as a smart watch or fitness tracker," said Rust. "If we could have access to the kind of data that you can follow a person over time and see how the rhythms of his behavior change, you may be able to provide him with very useful information about his biological clock."
More information:
"The geographically resolved rhythms of using Twitter reveal social pressures on patterns of daily activity," Current biology (2018). DOI: 10.1016 / j.cub.2018.10.016, https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)31345-9
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