Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media

Networked social media provide infrastructure that allows information to flow far and wide. Politicians, celebrities, and corporations are jumping in with the hopes that they can get their message out. Sometimes messages do get widespread attention, but people complain that these are the “wrong” messages – the inaccurate, the humiliating, the saccharine. Understanding how information flows through networked technologies requires moving away from the potential of the infrastructure and focusing on the logic of the network itself. What are people’s incentives for spreading information? How and why do they distribute content? What social and structural barriers exist that configure how information is disseminated? And how can we understand the flows of content in the context of everyday practices?