Social Media and Attention

The past decade has witnessed a momentous transformation in the way people interact and exchange information with each other. Content is now co-produced, shared, classified and rated on the Web by millions of people, while attention has become the ephemeral and valuable resource that everyone seeks to acquire. This talk will focus on how social attention is allocated among all media and how it decays as novelty fades and new content is created. This will be followed by a description of the role that attention plays in the production and consumption of content within social media and how its dynamics can be used to predict future trends and consumer behavior.