Competition among memes in a world with limited attention
Indiana University Bloomington · Institute for Scientific Interchange · +2 more institutions
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…
Citation impact
- FWCI
- 38.59
- Percentile
- 100%
- References
- 50
Authors
4Topics & keywords
- Popularity
- Competition (biology)
- Microblogging
- Social media
- Data science
- Homophily
- Computer science
- Affect (linguistics)