The Rising Entropy of English in the Attention Economy

Charlie Pilgrim, Weisi Guo and Thomas T. Hills

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: We present evidence that the word entropy of American English has been rising steadily since around 1900, contrary to predictions from existing sociolinguistic theories. We also find differences in word entropy between media categories, with short-form media such as news and magazines having higher entropy than long-form media, and social media feeds having higher entropy still. To explain these results we develop an ecological model of the attention economy that combines ideas from Zipf's law and information foraging. In this model, media consumers maximize information utility rate taking into account the costs of information search, while media producers adapt to technologies that reduce search costs, driving them to generate higher entropy content in increasingly shorter formats.

Date: 2021-07, Revised 2023-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-isf and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.12848 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2107.12848

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().