The Evolving Landscape of Online Behavior and Attention Economy

The field of online behavior and attention economy is undergoing significant changes, driven by the emergence of new forms of antisocial behavior, the increasing importance of personalized ranking of social media content, and the need to understand and mitigate the negative externalities of excessive screen time. Researchers are exploring innovative approaches to identify and evaluate cognitive-behavioral fixation, as well as developing new frameworks for assessing and regulating attention capture. A key direction in this field is the recognition of attention as a scarce and valuable resource, which requires a paradigm shift from treating it as a private asset to protecting it as a collective resource vital for human agency, health, and democracy. Noteworthy papers in this area include: Understanding Fanchuan in Livestreaming Platforms, which sheds light on a novel form of online antisocial behavior, and No Such Thing as Free Brain Time, which proposes a Pigouvian tax on attention capture to internalize the externalities of the attention economy.

Sources

Understanding Fanchuan in Livestreaming Platforms: A New Form of Online Antisocial Behavior

"Low Frequency Tweeters Have More to Say!" A New Approach to Identify Importance of Tweets

Evaluating Cognitive-Behavioral Fixation via Multimodal User Viewing Patterns on Social Media

No Such Thing as Free Brain Time: For a Pigouvian Tax on Attention Capture

Signals in the Noise: Decoding Unexpected Engagement Patterns on Twitter

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