Competition among memes in a world with limited attention

• Published in: Scientific reports 2012-03, Vol.2 (1), p.335-335, Article 335
• Main Authors: Weng, L., Flammini, A., Vespignani, A., Menczer, F.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 639/705/259; 639/705/531; 639/766/530; Competition; Heterogeneity; Humanities and Social Sciences; multidisciplinary; Science; Social networks; Social organization
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/srep00335

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.