From Individual to Collective Attention – Models and Dynamics

In media-rich living spaces (like cities of the future, urban and rural living residencies, virtual societies, etc.), where thousands of people are overflooded with signals and messages at all levels of perception and modalities (visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory) while engaging -actively or passivelyin the mechanisms of social life and society, the (i) dynamics of individual attention and the (ii) emergence of collective attention appear to be among the most demanding challenges of the information society. It is of high interest to understand how spontaneous, local, individual attention to novel information items occurs, propagates and eventually fades among large populations.