Image credit: CRiSS-LABAbstract
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
Associate Professor, Data Science Institute, School of Engineering, Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile. Head of CRiSS-LAB.
Cristian Candia studies how societies transform information into collective relevance through attention, memory, preferences, and coordination. His work combines computational social science, network science, AI, and large-scale behavioral data to understand how groups, institutions, and societies decide what matters.
Cristián Jara-Figueroa
Head of CashApp Advanced Insights and Modeling
Carlos Rodriguez-Sickert
Universidad del Desarrollo.
Lászlo Barabási
Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science at Northeastern University
