Abstract
The Internet not only has changed the dynamics of our collective attention but also through the transactional log of online activities, provides us with the opportunity to study attention dynamics at scale. In this paper, we particularly study attention to aircraft incidents and accidents using Wikipedia transactional data in two different language editions, English and Spanish. We study both the editorial activities on and the viewership of the articles about airline crashes. We analyse how the level of attention is influenced by different parameters such as number of deaths, airline region, and event locale and date. We find evidence that the attention given by Wikipedia editors to pre-Wikipedia aircraft incidents and accidents depends on the region of the airline for both English and Spanish editions. North American airline companies receive more prompt coverage in English Wikipedia. We also observe that the attention given by Wikipedia visitors is influenced by the airline region but only for events with a high number of deaths. Finally we show that the rate and time span of the decay of attention is independent of the number of deaths and a fast decay within about a week seems to be universal. We discuss the implications of these findings in the context of attention bias.
Highlights
The Internet has drastically changed the flow of information in our society
Our results are divided in three sections: the first part deals with the editorial coverage of the events, the second with the immediate collective attention quantified by viewership statistics and the third with the modelling of attention decay
We studied online attention to aircraft incidents and accidents using editorial and viewership data for the English and Spanish editions of Wikipedia
Summary
The Internet has drastically changed the flow of information in our society. Online technologies enable us to have direct access to much of the world’s established knowledge through services such as Wikipedia and to informal user-generated content through social media. There is no theoretical limit to the information bandwidth on the Internet but human attention has its own limits. Public attention to emerging topics decays over time or suffers the so-called memory buoyancy from users, which is a metaphor of information objects sinking down in the digital memory with decreasing importance and usage, increasing their distance to the user [1].
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