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