Accelerating dynamics of collective attention
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Supplementary information
Date
2019-04-15
Authors
Lorenz-Spreen, Philipp
Mønsted, Bjarke Mørch
Hövel, Philipp
Lehmann, Sune
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Springer Nature
Published Version
Abstract
With news pushed to smart phones in real time and social media reactions spreading across the globe in seconds, the public discussion can appear accelerated and temporally fragmented. In longitudinal datasets across various domains, covering multiple decades, we find increasing gradients and shortened periods in the trajectories of how cultural items receive collective attention. Is this the inevitable conclusion of the way information is disseminated and consumed? Our findings support this hypothesis. Using a simple mathematical model of topics competing for finite collective attention, we are able to explain the empirical data remarkably well. Our modeling suggests that the accelerating ups and downs of popular content are driven by increasing production and consumption of content, resulting in a more rapid exhaustion of limited attention resources. In the interplay with competition for novelty, this causes growing turnover rates and individual topics receiving shorter intervals of collective attention.
Description
Keywords
Public discussion , Datasets , Collective attention
Citation
Lorenz-Spreen, P., Mønsted, B.M., Hövel, P. and Lehmann, S., 2019. Accelerating dynamics of collective attention. Nature communications, 10(1), (1759). DOI:10.1038/s41467-019-09311-w