Pilgrim Charlie, Guo Weisi, Hills Thomas T
Mathematics, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK.
The Mathematics of Real-World Systems CDT, The University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.
Commun Psychol. 2024 Aug 1;2(1):70. doi: 10.1038/s44271-024-00117-1.
We present evidence that the word entropy of American English has been rising steadily since around 1900. We also find differences in word entropy between media categories, with short-form media such as news and magazines having higher entropy than long-form media, and social media feeds having higher entropy still. To explain these results we develop an ecological model of the attention economy that combines ideas from Zipf's law and information foraging. In this model, media consumers maximize information utility rate taking into account the costs of information search, while media producers adapt to technologies that reduce search costs, driving them to generate higher entropy content in increasingly shorter formats.
我们提供的证据表明，自1900年左右以来，美国英语的词汇熵一直在稳步上升。我们还发现不同媒体类别之间存在词汇熵差异，新闻和杂志等短格式媒体的熵高于长格式媒体，而社交媒体动态的熵更高。为了解释这些结果，我们开发了一种注意力经济的生态模型，该模型结合了齐普夫定律和信息觅食的思想。在这个模型中，媒体消费者在考虑信息搜索成本的情况下最大化信息利用率，而媒体生产者则适应降低搜索成本的技术，促使他们以越来越短的格式生成熵更高的内容。
