Never before has the amount of information that we can access been so abundant. Thanks to (or because of) the Internet, millions of people are overwhelmed by the volume of messages and news that are published daily. Given this situation, is it possible to establish a guideline on collective care?
Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman, two statistical physicists at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, think so. That is why they have studied how users of digg.com act, a website where Internet users themselves decide which news to highlight from the avalanche of daily information. And they have come up with a figure: 69 minutes , the average time it takes for a news item to fade.
Wu and Huberman say their findings could help website designers find new ways to hold their users’ attention. Although the most important thing, they say, is that the Internet can be a “natural laboratory” to study collective behavior on a large scale.
