Image credit: CRiSS-LABResumen
Collective memory and attention are sustained by two channels oral communication (communicative memory) and the physical recording of information (cultural memory). Here, we use data on the citation of academic articles and patents, and on the online attention received by songs, movies and biographies, to describe the temporal decay of the attention received by cultural products. We show that, once we isolate the temporal dimension of the decay, the attention received by cultural products decays following a universal biexponential function. We explain this universality by proposing a mathematical model based on communicative and cultural memory, which fits the data better than previously proposed log-normal and exponential models. Our results reveal that biographies remain in our communicative memory the longest (20–30 years) and music the shortest (about 5.6 years). These findings show that the average attention received by cultural products decays following a universal biexponential function.
Cristian Candia
Profesor Asociado y Director de CRiSS-LAB, Facultad de Ingeniería y Facultad de Gobierno, Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile.
Mis intereses de investigación incluyen IA aplicada, ciencias sociales computacionales, ciencia de redes, inteligencia colectiva, convivencia escolar, inteligencia de decisiones y analítica de negocios.
Cristián Jara-Figueroa
Director de Advanced Insights and Modeling en Cash App
Carlos Rodriguez-Sickert
Centro de Investigación en Complejidad Social (CICS), Facultad de Gobierno, Universidad del Desarrollo.
Lászlo Barabási
Profesor Robert Gray Dodge de Ciencia de Redes en Northeastern University
