Novelty and Collective Attention

The subject of collective attention is central to an information age where millions of people are inundated with daily messages. It is thus of interest to understand how attention to novel items propagates and eventually fades among large populations. We have analyzed the dynamics of collective atte...

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Published inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 104; no. 45; pp. 17599 - 17601
Main Authors Wu, Fang, Huberman, Bernardo A.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States National Academy of Sciences 06.11.2007
National Acad Sciences
Subjects
Advertising research
Attention - physiology
Cognition & reasoning
Dynamic modeling
dynamic models
Exploratory Behavior - physiology
Fall lines
Habituation
Humans
Information
Logarithms
Measurement
memory
Models, Psychological
people
perceptions (cognitive)
Population Density
Sample mean
Sample variance
Social Behavior
Social Sciences
Viral marketing
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Summary:The subject of collective attention is central to an information age where millions of people are inundated with daily messages. It is thus of interest to understand how attention to novel items propagates and eventually fades among large populations. We have analyzed the dynamics of collective attention among 1 million users of an interactive web site, digg.com, devoted to thousands of novel news stories. The observations can be described by a dynamical model characterized by a single novelty factor. Our measurements indicate that novelty within groups decays with a stretched-exponential law, suggesting the existence of a natural time scale over which attention fades.
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Edited by Harry L. Swinney, University of Texas, Austin, TX, and approved September 14, 2007
Author contributions: F.W. and B.A.H. performed research, analyzed data, and wrote the paper.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.0704916104