The production of information in the attention economy

TL;DR

This paper investigates how collective attention influences the creation and consumption of new information in online networks, proposing a normalization method to analyze attention dynamics across diverse topics.

Contribution

It introduces a normalization technique for comparing attention bursts across topics and demonstrates the link between attention shifts and knowledge production using Wikipedia data.

Findings

Attention shifts correlate with increased knowledge production

Attention allocation stimulates demand and supply of information

Temporal analysis reveals demand precedes supply in information dynamics

Abstract

Online traces of human activity offer novel opportunities to study the dynamics of complex knowledge exchange networks, and in particular how the relationship between demand and supply of information is mediated by competition for our limited individual attention. The emergent patterns of collective attention determine what new information is generated and consumed. Can we measure the relationship between demand and supply for new information about a topic? Here we propose a normalization method to compare attention bursts statistics across topics that have an heterogeneous distribution of attention. Through analysis of a massive dataset on traffic to Wikipedia, we find that the production of new knowledge is associated to significant shifts of collective attention, which we take as a proxy for its demand. What we observe is consistent with a scenario in which the allocation of attention toward a topic stimulates the demand for information about it, and in turn the supply of further novel information. Our attempt to quantify demand and supply of information, and our finding about their temporal ordering, may lead to the development of the fundamental laws of the attention economy, and a better understanding of the social exchange of knowledge in online and offline information networks.