Competition among memes in a world with limited attention
Authored by L. Weng, A. Flammini, A. Vespignani, F. Menczer
Date Published: 2012-03-29
DOI: 10.1038/srep00335
Sponsors:
James S. McDonnell Foundation
Lilly Endowment
United States National Science Foundation (NSF)
Platforms:
No platforms listed
Model Documentation:
Other Narrative
Model Code URLs:
Model code not found
Abstract
The wide adoption of social media has increased the competition among ideas for our finite attention. We employ a parsimonious agent-based model to study whether such a competition may affect the popularity of different memes, the diversity of information we are exposed to, and the fading of our collective interests for specific topics. Agents share messages on a social network but can only pay attention to a portion of the information they receive. In the emerging dynamics of information diffusion, a few memes go viral while most do not. The predictions of our model are consistent with empirical data from Twitter, a popular microblogging platform. Surprisingly, we can explain the massive heterogeneity in the popularity and persistence of memes as deriving from a combination of the competition for our limited attention and the structure of the social network, without the need to assume different intrinsic values among ideas.
Tags
Nonlinear dynamics
Information Theory And Computation
Thermodynamics
statistical physics