The rising entropy of English in the attention economy
| dc.contributor.author | Pilgrim, Charlie | |
| dc.contributor.author | Guo, Weisi | |
| dc.contributor.author | Hills, Thomas T. | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-09-03T10:11:44Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2024-09-03T10:11:44Z | |
| dc.date.freetoread | 2024-09-03 | |
| dc.date.issued | 2024-08-01 | |
| dc.date.pubOnline | 2024-08-01 | |
| dc.description.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. | |
| dc.description.journalName | Communications Psychology | |
| dc.description.sponsorship | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Royal Society | |
| dc.description.sponsorship | The study was funded by the EPSRC grant for the Mathematics for Real- World Systems CDT at Warwick (grant number EP/L015374/1). T.T.H. was supported on this work by the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (WM160074) and a Fellowship from the Alan Turing Institute, which is funded by EPSRC (grant number EP/N510129/1). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. | |
| dc.identifier.citation | Pilgrim C, Guo W, Hills TT. (2024) The rising entropy of English in the attention economy. Communications Psychology, Volume 2, July 2024, Article number 70 | |
| dc.identifier.eissn | 2731-9121 | |
| dc.identifier.elementsID | 549750 | |
| dc.identifier.issn | 2731-9121 | |
| dc.identifier.issueNo | 1 | |
| dc.identifier.paperNo | 70 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-024-00117-1 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk/handle/1826/22838 | |
| dc.identifier.volumeNo | 2 | |
| dc.language | English | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.publisher | Springer Science and Business Media LLC | |
| dc.publisher.uri | https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-024-00117-1 | |
| dc.rights | Attribution 4.0 International | en |
| dc.rights.uri | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | |
| dc.subject | 4701 Communication and Media Studies | |
| dc.subject | 47 Language, Communication and Culture | |
| dc.title | The rising entropy of English in the attention economy | |
| dc.type | Article | |
| dcterms.dateAccepted | 2024-07-11 |