Virtual world avatars provide clues to how trends spread

University of Michigan researchers in the US are analysing information regarding the virtual world Second Life avatars to study how trends or “gestures” spread across this online community.

The researchers describe gestures as code snippets that Second Life avatars must acquire in order to make motions such as dancing, waving or chanting.

According to them, roughly half of the gestures they have studied thus far made their way through the virtual world friend by friend.

"We could have found that most everyone goes to the store to buy gestures, but it turns out about 50 percent of gesture transfers are between people who have declared themselves friends. The social networks played a major role in the distribution of these assets," said Lada Adamic, an assistant professor in the School of Information and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

The researchers will make a presentation on their findings on July 7 at the Association for Computer Machinery''s Conference on Electronic Conference in Stanford, California.

"There''s been a high correspondence between the real world and virtual worlds. We''re not saying this is exactly how people share in the real world, but we believe it does have some relevance," Adamic said.

This study is one of the first to model social influence in a virtual world because of the rarity of having access to information about how information, assets or ideas propagate.

It has also shown that the gestures that spread from friend to friend are not distributed as broadly as ones that were distributed outside of the social network, such as those acquired in stores or as give-aways.

The researchers say that the early adopters of gestures, among the first 5-10 percent to acquire new assets. are not the same as the influencers who tend to distribute them most broadly. This aligns with what social scientists have found.

"In our study, we sought to develop a more rigorous understanding of social processes that underlies many cultural and economic phenomena. While some of our findings may seem quite intuitive, what I find most exciting is that we were actually able to test some rather controversial and competing hypotheses about the role of social networks in influence," graduate student Eytan Bakshy, who will be presenting the findings at the conference.

The researchers examined 130 days worth of gesture transfers in late 2008 and early 2009. They looked at 100,229 users and 106,499 gestures.

The team obtained the data from Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life. Personally-identifying information had been removed.