Method for Analyzing Sociodynamics of Telecommunication-Based Services

Abstract

We propose a method for evaluating the fit of services with users. We adopted a theory for media which conceptually described the organization of inflows generated by individuals. To obtain a formal representation, a natural pairing between inflows and contained entities is used. This pairing enables us to alternatively represent the notions of flows and entities in freely generated linear spaces, which is consistent with conventional data analyses. We discuss how the social structures of the organization of inflows are shown by alternative representation. We give an example using graphs extracted from data of a questionnaire survey on media use. We also discuss how the social structures are possibly characterized by the spectral structure of the conventional Gram matrix. We show that spectral deviations of a normalized Gram matrix enable us to characterize the media structures of web-based video services, which explains differences in service growth and the speed of growth.