Understanding the Impact of Geographical Distance on Online Discussions

People in geographically close areas tend to show similarities in their interests such as sports, food, and festivals, which is often reflected in their discussion. Lifestyle and the way of communication among people living nearby play an essential role in this similarity. However, with the popularity of online social media platforms, communication with distant persons has become much easier and frequent. In one sense, social media platforms help in breaking the barrier of distance and bring people across geography closer. With this, a comprehensive study is required to understand whether geographical distance still has a significant impact on discussion or it has already faded and made us a global citizen. Moreover, if there is an impact of geographical distance on discussion, then it would be interesting to investigate whether this impact is uniform across different topics of discussion or not. This understanding will help in targeted marketing, advertisement, and policy-making. In this article, we analyze the geotagged tweet data collected for a period of around five months for three countries, USA, U.K., and India, each with diverse cultures and unique identities. We measure the impact of geographical distance at a finer granularity (within a country) in online discussions in terms of content similarity and other geographical parameters of topical tweets. This article reflects that there is a significant homogenization in online discussions with respect to geographical distance; however, this homogenization is not similar across all the topics of discussion and location. The impact varies depending on the topic of discussion and location.