Rising tides or rising stars?: Dynamics of shared attention on Twitter during media events

Abstract

"Media events" such as political debates generate conditions of shared attention as many users simultaneously tune in with the dual screens of broadcast and social media to view and participate. Are collective patterns of user behavior under conditions of shared attention distinct from other "bursts" of activity like breaking news events? Using data from a population of approximately 200,000 politically-active Twitter users, we compare features of their behavior during eight major events during the 2012 U.S. presidential election to examine (1) the impact of "media events" have on patterns of social media use compared to "typical" time and (2) whether changes during media events are attributable to changes in behavior across the entire population or an artifact of changes in elite users' behavior. Our findings suggest that while this population became more active during media events, this additional activity reflects concentrated attention to a handful of users, hashtags, and tweets. Our work is the first study on distinguishing patterns of large-scale social behavior under condition of uncertainty and shared attention, suggesting new ways of mining information from social media to support collective sensemaking following major events.

13 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Statistical physics of social dynamics
• Robust dynamic classes revealed by measuring the response function of a social system
• Novelty and Collective Attention
• How Visibility and Divided Attention Constrain Social Contagion
• #Bigbirds Never Die: Understanding Social Dynamics of Emergent Hashtag

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Climate change sentiment on Twitter: An unsolicited public opinion poll
• Timescales of Massive Human Entrainment
• Analysing Twitter Semantic Networks: the case of 2018 Italian Elections
• Big data challenges for the social sciences: from society and opinion to replications
• A model for meme popularity growth in social networking systems based on biological principle and human interest dynamics
• Anticipating Activity in Social Media Spikes
• Interactional and Informational Attention on Twitter
• Twitter in Academic Conferences: Usage, Networking and Participation over Time