Community Computing: Comparisons between Rural and Urban Societies Using Mobile Phone Data

We present a comparative analysis of the behavioral dynamics of rural and urban societies using four years of mobile phone data from all 1.4M subscribers within a small country. We use information from communication logs and top up denominations to characterize attributes such as socioeconomic status and region. We show that rural and urban communities differ dramatically not only in terms of personal network topologies, but also in terms of inferred behavioral characteristics such as travel. We confirm the hypothesis for behavioral adaptation, demonstrating that individuals change their patterns of communication to increase the similarity with their new social environment. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive comparison between regional groups of this size.