Abstract
In the era of social media, every day billions of individuals produce content in socio-technical systems resulting in a deluge of information. However, human attention is a limited resource and it is increasingly challenging to consume the most suitable content for one’s interests. In fact, the complex interplay between individual and social activities in social systems overwhelmed by information results in bursty activity of collective attention which are still poorly understood. Here, we tackle this challenge by analyzing the online activity of millions of users in a popular microblogging platform during exceptional events, from NBA Finals to the elections of Pope Francis and the discovery of gravitational waves. We observe extreme fluctuations in collective attention that we are able to characterize and explain by considering the co-occurrence of two fundamental factors: the heterogeneity of social interactions and the preferential attention towards influential users. Our findings demonstrate how combining simple mechanisms provides a route towards understanding complex social phenomena.
Highlights
The ability to filter the most relevant data out of a deluge of information is one of the characteristics of human intelligence
Recent studies highlighted the effects of the topological features, i.e. the underlying network of interactions, as well as of competing dynamics and memory time on the spreading phenomena observed in socio-technical systems[26]
Many studies proposed different models based on the interplay between social structure and complex spreading dynamics to characterize the collective behavior observed in social media[27], specially during special events such as the discovery of the “God particle”[28] or in response to real-world exogenous shocks such as disasters[29]
Summary
The ability to filter the most relevant data out of a deluge of information is one of the characteristics of human intelligence. Recent studies highlighted the effects of the topological features, i.e. the underlying network of interactions, as well as of competing dynamics and memory time on the spreading phenomena observed in socio-technical systems[26] Along this direction, many studies proposed different models based on the interplay between social structure and complex spreading dynamics to characterize the collective behavior observed in social media[27], specially during special events such as the discovery of the “God particle”[28] or in response to real-world exogenous shocks such as disasters[29]. We consider a preferential attachment process, related to individual’s neighborhood and social connectivity that characterizes the network topology, and a preferential attention process, a cognitive dynamics related to individual’s attention bias towards specific users of the network
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