Competition among memes in a world with limited attention

TLDR

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 competition may affect meme popularity, the diversity of information we are exposed to, and the fading of collective interests for specific topics. The model simulates agents sharing messages on a social network while each can attend only a fraction of received information. The model predicts that a few memes go viral while most do not, matching Twitter data, and attributes the heterogeneity in popularity and persistence to limited attention competition and network structure rather than intrinsic idea value.

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 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.