Cognitive network dynamics in chatlines

Beyond their common use for interpersonal communication, chatlines (also chatrooms) can be formalised as dynamic systems with heuristics. We have studied chatlines in the framework of social networks. The design and data analysis of chatlines opens a new interesting research direction in social network studies. It provides the opportunity of studying the dynamics of human social behaviour in experimental ’controlled’ (or nearly controlled) conditions. Our study aims to point out both the analogy with physical systems of interacting objects and the social network emerging properties linked to the existence of different communication patterns and usage of different heuristics in the participants. We describe guidelines for effective implementation of a chatline in controlled experimental conditions. We identified several parameters which represent meaningfull statistical estimators of the activity of the network and we computed the correlation of these parameters and measures of network statistics.