Are human interactivity times lognormal?

Abstract: In this paper, we are analyzing the interactivity time, defined as the duration between two consecutive tasks such as sending emails, collecting friends and followers and writing comments in online social networks (OSNs). The distributions of these times are heavy tailed and often described by a power-law distribution. However, power-law distributions usually only fit the heavy tail of empirical data and ignore the information in the smaller value range. Here, we argue that the durations between writing emails or comments, adding friends and receiving followers are likely to follow a lognormal distribution. We discuss the similarities between power-law and lognormal distributions, show that binning of data can deform a lognormal to a power-law distribution and propose an explanation for the appearance of lognormal interactivity times. The historical debate of similarities between lognormal and power-law distributions is reviewed by illustrating the resemblance of measurements in this paper with the historical problem of income and city size distributions.