Communication in Online Social Networks Fosters Cultural Isolation

Table 1

Basic assumptions of the dissemination of culture model with one-to-one communication and our implementation with one-to-many communication.

	One-to-one communication	One-to-many communication
(1) Select active agent	Every time step pick an agent from the population^1	Every time step pick an agent from the population
(2) Select communication partner	Pick a neighbor of agent	(not needed)
(3) Select communicated trait	Pick a feature on which and differ ()	Pick a feature on which and at least one neighbor differ (, for any )
(4) Homophilous social influence	With a probability equal to the proportion of traits that and share ( over ), let adopt trait from	With a probability equal to the proportion of traits that and share ( over ), let each neighbor adopt trait from

In the original model, Axelrod describes influence to go from , but in order to make the formalization of one-to-one and one-to-many communication comparable, we change the phrasing of influence to go from . The two implementations are mathematically equivalent.