Title: The Internet as Quantitative Social Science Platform: Insights from a Trillion Observations,
Abstract: With the large-scale penetration of the internet, for the first time,
humanity has become linked by a single, open, communications platform.
Harnessing this fact, we report insights arising from a unified internet
activity and location dataset of an unparalleled scope and accuracy drawn from
over a trillion (1.5$\times 10^{12}$) observations of end-user internet
connections, with temporal resolution of just 15min over 2006-2012. We first
apply this dataset to the expansion of the internet itself over 1,647 urban
agglomerations globally. We find that unique IP per capita counts reach
saturation at approximately one IP per three people, and take, on average, 16.1
years to achieve; eclipsing the estimated 100- and 60- year saturation times
for steam-power and electrification respectively. Next, we use intra-diurnal
internet activity features to up-scale traditional over-night sleep
observations, producing the first global estimate of over-night sleep duration
in 645 cities over 7 years. We find statistically significant variation between
continental, national and regional sleep durations including some evidence of
global sleep duration convergence. Finally, we estimate the relationship
between internet concentration and economic outcomes in 411 OECD regions and
find that the internet's expansion is associated with negative or positive
productivity gains, depending strongly on sectoral considerations. To our
knowledge, our study is the first of its kind to use online/offline activity of
the entire internet to infer social science insights, demonstrating the
unparalleled potential of the internet as a social data-science platform.