The blogosphere as an excitable social medium: Richter's and Omori's Law in media coverage

TL;DR

This paper analyzes online blog activity to reveal that media attention dynamics resemble earthquake patterns, with media events following Gutenberg-Richter and Omori's laws, and shows potential predictability of endogenous media events.

Contribution

It demonstrates that media attention in blogs follows earthquake-like statistical laws and introduces a method to predict endogenous media events based on early word frequency behavior.

Findings

Media events follow Gutenberg-Richter law for size distribution.

Media attention dynamics follow Omori's law before and after events.

Endogenous event reception correlates with initial word frequency behavior.

Abstract

We study the dynamics of public media attention by monitoring the content of online blogs. Social and media events can be traced by the propagation of word frequencies of related keywords. Media events are classified as exogenous - where blogging activity is triggered by an external news item - or endogenous where word frequencies build up within a blogging community without external influences. We show that word occurrences show statistical similarities to earthquakes. The size distribution of media events follows a Gutenberg-Richter law, the dynamics of media attention before and after the media event follows Omori's law. We present further empirical evidence that for media events of endogenous origin the overall public reception of the event is correlated with the behavior of word frequencies at the beginning of the event, and is to a certain degree predictable. These results may imply that the process of opinion formation in a human society might be related to effects known from excitable media.