IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/phsmap/v390y2011i21p3870-3875.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The blogosphere as an excitable social medium: Richter’s and Omori’s Law in media coverage

Author

Listed:
  • Klimek, Peter
  • Bayer, Werner
  • Thurner, Stefan

Abstract

We study the dynamics of public media attention by monitoring the content of online blogs. Social and media events can be traced by the propagation of word frequencies of related keywords. Media events are classified as exogenous–where blogging activity is triggered by an external news item–or endogenous where word frequencies build up within a blogging community without external influences. We show that word occurrences exhibit statistical similarities to earthquakes. Moreover the size distribution of events scales with a similar exponent as found in the Gutenberg–Richter law. The dynamics of media events before and after the main event can be satisfactorily modeled as a type of process which has been used to understand fore–and aftershock rate distributions in earthquakes–the Omori law. We present empirical evidence that for media events of endogenous origin the overall public reception of the event is correlated with the behavior of word frequencies at the beginning of the event, and is to a certain degree predictable. These results imply that the process of opinion formation in a human society might be related to effects known from excitable media.

Suggested Citation

  • Klimek, Peter & Bayer, Werner & Thurner, Stefan, 2011. "The blogosphere as an excitable social medium: Richter’s and Omori’s Law in media coverage," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 390(21), pages 3870-3875.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:390:y:2011:i:21:p:3870-3875
    DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2011.05.033
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437111004390
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.physa.2011.05.033?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. M. Mitrović & B. Tadić, 2010. "Bloggers behavior and emergent communities in Blog space," The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Springer;EDP Sciences, vol. 73(2), pages 293-301, January.
    2. Sornette, D & Helmstetter, A, 2003. "Endogenous versus exogenous shocks in systems with memory," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 318(3), pages 577-591.
    3. Lambiotte, R. & Ausloos, M., 2006. "Endo- vs. exogenous shocks and relaxation rates in book and music “sales”," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 362(2), pages 485-494.
    4. I. Farkas & D. Helbing & T. Vicsek, 2002. "Mexican waves in an excitable medium," Nature, Nature, vol. 419(6903), pages 131-132, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Michael Szell & Sébastian Grauwin & Carlo Ratti, 2014. "Contraction of Online Response to Major Events," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 9(2), pages 1-9, February.
    2. Busby, J.S. & Onggo, B.S.S. & Liu, Y., 2016. "Agent-based computational modelling of social risk responses," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 251(3), pages 1029-1042.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Marcel Ausloos, 2014. "A biased view of a few possible components when reflecting on the present decade financial and economic crisis," Papers 1412.0127, arXiv.org.
    2. Marcel Ausloos, 2013. "Econophysics: Comments on a Few Applications, Successes, Methods and Models," IIM Kozhikode Society & Management Review, , vol. 2(2), pages 101-115, July.
    3. Selçuk, Faruk & Gençay, Ramazan, 2006. "Intraday dynamics of stock market returns and volatility," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 367(C), pages 375-387.
    4. Sornette, Didier & Zhou, Wei-Xing, 2006. "Importance of positive feedbacks and overconfidence in a self-fulfilling Ising model of financial markets," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 370(2), pages 704-726.
    5. Groot, Robert D., 2005. "Lévy distribution and long correlation times in supermarket sales," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 353(C), pages 501-514.
    6. John Fry & McMillan David, 2015. "Stochastic modelling for financial bubbles and policy," Cogent Economics & Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 3(1), pages 1002152-100, December.
    7. John Fry, 2014. "Bubbles, shocks and elementary technical trading strategies," The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Springer;EDP Sciences, vol. 87(1), pages 1-13, January.
    8. Ausloos, Marcel & Nedic, Olgica & Dekanski, Aleksandar, 2016. "Day of the week effect in paper submission/acceptance/rejection to/in/by peer review journals," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 456(C), pages 197-203.
    9. Mei-Ling Cai & Zhang-HangJian Chen & Sai-Ping Li & Xiong Xiong & Wei Zhang & Ming-Yuan Yang & Fei Ren, 2022. "New volatility evolution model after extreme events," Papers 2201.03213, arXiv.org.
    10. Farkas, I & Helbing, D & Vicsek, T, 2003. "Human waves in stadiums," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 330(1), pages 18-24.
    11. Aki-Hiro Sato, 2012. "Econoinformatics meets Data-Centric Social Sciences," Papers 1210.4643, arXiv.org, revised Apr 2013.
    12. Krawczyk, M.J. & Dydejczyk, A. & Kułakowski, K., 2014. "The Simmel effect and babies’ names," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 395(C), pages 384-391.
    13. F. Schweitzer & D. Garcia, 2010. "An agent-based model of collective emotions in online communities," The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Springer;EDP Sciences, vol. 77(4), pages 533-545, October.
    14. Tanya Araujo & Francisco Louca, 2007. "The geometry of crashes. A measure of the dynamics of stock market crises," Quantitative Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 7(1), pages 63-74.
    15. Miśkiewicz, Janusz, 2012. "Economy with the time delay of information flow—The stock market case," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 391(4), pages 1388-1394.
    16. Lambiotte, R. & Ausloos, M. & Thelwall, M., 2007. "Word statistics in Blogs and RSS feeds: Towards empirical universal evidence," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 1(4), pages 277-286.
    17. R. D. Groot, 2004. "Levy distribution and long correlation times in supermarket sales," Papers cond-mat/0412163, arXiv.org.
    18. Fry, John, 2012. "Exogenous and endogenous crashes as phase transitions in complex financial systems," MPRA Paper 36202, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    19. Felix Riede & R. Bentley, 2008. "Increasing the relevance of mathematical approaches to demographic history," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 42(2), pages 275-281, April.
    20. Sandra Sydnor & Linda Niehm & Yoon Lee & Maria Marshall & Holly Schrank, 2017. "Analysis of post-disaster damage and disruptive impacts on the operating status of small businesses after Hurricane Katrina," Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, Springer;International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, vol. 85(3), pages 1637-1663, February.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:390:y:2011:i:21:p:3870-3875. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/physica-a-statistical-mechpplications/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.