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It's not often you open a mathematical research paper and find a Pablo Neruda poem. But a new study in the journal Nature Human Behavior begins just like that: "Es tan corto el amor, y tan largo el olvido." Translation? "Love is so short, forgetting is so long."
The paper, titled "The universal decay of collective memory and attention," is an ambitious attempt to turn the slow slippage of cultural memory—the way a hit song lingers, or doesn't—into a quantitative method for measuring the way our attention to various cultural products declines. It seeks, in other words, to turn the most abstract cognitive phenomenon into a cold, hard equation.
[...] The process of decline was similar among all of the artifacts the researchers studied, but the amount of time it took for each to fade varied by domain. Biographies lasted the longest, circulating in the collective memory for 20 to 30 years. Music disappeared the fastest, lasting just 5.6 years on average.
[...] The work could fuel research into our species' tendency to forget large spans of history, with landmark events tucked away into our cultural memory, sans context of the surrounding years and minus the perspective of characters we don't care for. Perhaps understanding how quickly these historical moments fade—morphing from the truth we lived to the condensed narrative we save for posterity—could keep us from constantly repeating ourselves.
How long can an event hold humanity's attention?
Sorry for the long link to the paper. The shorter link gives access to the abstract.
[Paper - Abstract] The universal decay of collective memory and attention
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 15 2018, @10:57PM (1 child)
And You think Internet is better?
Most of these "so independent" Internet users are force-fed with an information equivalent of fast-food. Social media is literally infested with it, search engines with their neophilia instead of giving requested results too, it's more and more difficult not to find it.
And someone holds a lever to the valve of this pseudo-information stream. More this, more that and you control it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by khallow on Sunday December 16 2018, @04:46AM
Absolutely. Push content is always easier to control. For example, this study [ssrn.com] of the effects of austerity, found that countries with higher social media penetration had stronger protests to austerity measures than countries where TV and other traditional push technologies dominated.
Still better than TV.
More accurately, a lot of people hold a lot of levers.