Celular e mobilidade

A BBC publicou hoje uma matéria sobre o resultado de um estudo que analisou os hábitos e as práticas de mobildiade de mais de 100 mil usuários de telefones celulares. A pesquisa afirma que temos o hábito de andar pelos mesmos lugares, em um raio de, no máximo, 10 km. De acordo com a hipótese de André Lemos, o resultado do estudo "corrobora a idéia de que os dispositivos móveis aliam mobilidade física e informacional".

Embora a pesquisa esteja centrada na mobilidade física e não explicitamente na informacional, os hábitos apontados, comenta Lemos, "estão atreledos ao uso de lugares familiares, mostrando como a relação das tecnologias digitais móveis com processos de espacialização está longe de ser constitutiva apenas de "não-lugares", ou ainda de "perda do sentido dos lugares".

Abaixo trechos da matéria.

"(...) The study used data from the website wheresgeorge.com, which allows anyone to track a dollar bill as it circulates through the economy. The site has so far tracked nearly 130 million notes. Studies such as this suggested that humans wander in an apparently random fashion, similar to a so-called "Levy flight" pattern displayed by many foraging animals. However, Dr Gonzalez and her team do not believe this approach gives a complete picture of people's movements.

(...) The vast majority of people move around over a very short distance - around five to 10km," explained Professor Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, another member of the team. The results showed that most people's movements follow a precise mathematical relationship - known as a power law. "That was the first surprise," he told BBC News. The second surprise, he said, was that the patterns of people's movements, over short and long distances, were very similar: people tend to return to the same few places over and over again. "Why is this good news?" he asked. "If I were to build a model of how everyone moves in society and they were not similar then it would require six billion different models - each person would require a different description. (...)"

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