Memory Remains: Understanding Collective Memory in the Digital Age

TL;DR

This paper investigates how collective memory manifests in digital platforms by analyzing Wikipedia viewership data on aircraft crashes, revealing that attention to past events often exceeds focus on current events, demonstrating cascading memory effects.

Contribution

It introduces a quantitative model explaining how attention flows from current to past events based on similarity, a novel approach to understanding digital collective memory.

Findings

Secondary attention to past events exceeds primary attention to current events.

First report of cascading effects in collective memory online.

Model links viewership flow to similarity in time, geography, topic, and hyperlink structure.

Abstract

Recently developed information communication technologies, particularly the Internet, have affected how we, both as individuals and as a society, create, store, and recall information. Internet also provides us with a great opportunity to study memory using transactional large scale data, in a quantitative framework similar to the practice in statistical physics. In this project, we make use of online data by analysing viewership statistics of Wikipedia articles on aircraft crashes. We study the relation between recent events and past events and particularly focus on understanding memory triggering patterns. We devise a quantitative model that explains the flow of viewership from a current event to past events based on similarity in time, geography, topic, and the hyperlink structure of Wikipedia articles. We show that on average the secondary flow of attention to past events generated by such remembering processes is larger than the primary attention flow to the current event. We are the first to report these cascading effects.