Applico Lab, CNR-ISC, Rome, Italy.
Università di Venezia "Ca' Foscari", Venezia, Italy.
PLoS One. 2020 Mar 13;15(3):e0229129. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0229129. eCollection 2020.
The social brain hypothesis approximates the total number of social relationships we are able to maintain at 150. Similar cognitive constraints emerge in several aspects of our daily life, from our mobility to the way we communicate, and might even affect the way we consume information online. Indeed, despite the unprecedented amount of information we can access online, our attention span still remains limited. Furthermore, recent studies have shown that online users are more likely to ignore dissenting information, choosing instead to interact with information adhering to their own point of view. In this paper, we quantitatively analyse users' attention economy in news consumption on social media by analysing 14 million users interacting with 583 news outlets (pages) on Facebook over a time span of six years. In particular, we explore how users distribute their activity across news pages and topics. On the one hand, we find that, independently of their activity, users show a tendency to follow a very limited number of pages. On the other hand, users tend to interact with almost all the topics presented by their favoured pages. Finally, we introduce a taxonomy accounting for users' behaviour to distinguish between patterns of selective exposure and interest. Our findings suggest that segregation of users in echo chambers might be an emerging effect of users' activity on social media and that selective exposure-i.e. the tendency of users to consume information adhering to their preferred narratives-could be a major driver in their consumption patterns.
社交大脑假说（Social brain hypothesis）将我们能够维持的社交关系总数近似于 150 个。在我们日常生活的许多方面，类似的认知限制也会出现，从我们的流动性到我们的沟通方式，甚至可能影响我们在线获取信息的方式。事实上，尽管我们可以在线访问的信息量空前巨大，但我们的注意力仍然有限。此外，最近的研究表明，在线用户更有可能忽略不同意见的信息，而是选择与符合自己观点的信息进行互动。在本文中，我们通过分析 Facebook 上 1400 万用户在六年时间内与 583 个新闻媒体（页面）之间的互动，定量分析了用户在社交媒体上的新闻消费中的注意力经济。具体来说，我们探讨了用户如何在新闻页面和主题之间分配他们的活动。一方面，我们发现，无论他们的活动如何，用户都倾向于关注非常有限数量的页面。另一方面，用户倾向于与他们喜欢的页面上呈现的几乎所有主题进行互动。最后，我们引入了一个考虑用户行为的分类法，以区分选择性接触和兴趣模式。我们的研究结果表明，用户在回音室中的隔离可能是用户在社交媒体上的活动产生的一个新兴影响，而选择性接触——即用户消费符合其偏好叙事的信息的倾向——可能是他们消费模式的主要驱动因素。
