2017/01/19 by Klaus Ackermann, Simon D. Angus, Simon D Angus +5 · 3 voices
Computer Science · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Environmental Science · Mathematics · Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #Data-Driven Disease Surveillance #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Economics and business #FOS: Physical sciences #General Economics (econ.GN) #Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis #Impact of Light on Environment and Health #Machine Learning (stat.ML) #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #Social Capital and Networks #Social Media and Politics #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI) #cs.CY #cs.SI #econ.GN #physics.soc-ph #stat.ML
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1701.05632
openalex publication_date 2017/01/19 · arxiv published 2017/01/19 · arxiv updated 2017/01/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
With the large-scale penetration of the internet, for the first time,\nhumanity has become linked by a single, open, communications platform.\nHarnessing this fact, we report insights arising from a unified internet\nactivity and location dataset of an unparalleled scope and accuracy drawn from\nover a trillion (1.5\× 1012) observations of end-user internet\nconnections, with temporal resolution of just 15min over 2006-2012. We first\napply this dataset to the expansion of the internet itself over 1,647 urban\nagglomerations globally. We find that unique IP per capita counts reach\nsaturation at approximately one IP per three people, and take, on average, 16.1\nyears to achieve; eclipsing the estimated 100- and 60- year saturation times\nfor steam-power and electrification respectively. Next, we use intra-diurnal\ninternet activity features to up-scale traditional over-night sleep\nobservations, producing the first global estimate of over-night sleep duration\nin 645 cities over 7 years. We find statistically significant variation between\ncontinental, national and regional sleep durations including some evidence of\nglobal sleep duration convergence. Finally, we estimate the relationship\nbetween internet concentration and economic outcomes in 411 OECD regions and\nfind that the internet's expansion is associated with negative or positive\nproductivity gains, depending strongly on sectoral considerations. To our\nknowledge, our study is the first of its kind to use online/offline activity of\nthe entire internet to infer social science insights, demonstrating the\nunparalleled potential of the internet as a social data-science platform.\n