Competition among memes in a world with limited attention
he 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.
It’a sad music.
This video explains what happened later yesterday in egypt showing the military brutality towards egyptian people that only need freedom.
[Via]
![Victory [full of blood]
A complete photoset of the revolt in Egypt by “El Pais”. Click on image to see them all.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lwdwc4zsQZ1qz4mico1_500.jpg)
Victory [full of blood]
A complete photoset of the revolt in Egypt by “El Pais”. Click on image to see them all.
8 unmoving bodies in tahrir, pic i took 3 hours ago, just got to computer 2 upload. not sure how many dead vs. unconscious. corner of #tahrir sq & tahrir st.
