Pilgrim, C., Guo, W. and Hills, T.T. (2024) The rising entropy of English in the attention economy. Communications Psychology, 2. 70. ISSN 2731-9121
Abstract
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.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2024. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Mathematics (Leeds) > Statistics (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 07 Oct 2024 16:01 |
Last Modified: | 07 Oct 2024 16:01 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Nature |
Identification Number: | 10.1038/s44271-024-00117-1 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:217945 |