Postmortem memory of public figures in news and social media

Robert West (), Jure Leskovec and Christopher Potts
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Robert West: School of Computer and Communication Sciences, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
Jure Leskovec: Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
Christopher Potts: Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021, vol. 118, issue 38, e2106152118

Abstract: Deceased public figures are often said to live on in collective memory. We quantify this phenomenon by tracking mentions of 2,362 public figures in English-language online news and social media (Twitter) 1 y before and after death. We measure the sharp spike and rapid decay of attention following death and model collective memory as a composition of communicative and cultural memory. Clustering reveals four patterns of postmortem memory, and regression analysis shows that boosts in media attention are largest for premortem popular anglophones who died a young, unnatural death; that long-term boosts are smallest for leaders and largest for artists; and that, while both the news and Twitter are triggered by young and unnatural deaths, the news additionally curates collective memory when old persons or leaders die. Overall, we illuminate the age-old question of who is remembered by society, and the distinct roles of news and social media in collective memory formation.

Keywords: computational social science; collective memory; news and social media analysis; forgetting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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