Attention and Visibility in an Information Rich World

Abstract: As the rate of content production grows, we must make a staggering number of daily decisions about what information is worth acting on. For any flourishing online social media system, users can barely keep up with the new content shared by friends. How does the user-interface design help or hinder users' ability to find interesting content? We analyze the choices people make about which information to propagate on the social media sites Twitter and Digg. We observe regularities in behavior which can be attributed directly to cognitive limitations of humans, resulting from the different visibility policies of each site. We quantify how people divide their limited attention among competing sources of information, and we show how the user-interface design can mediate information spread.