Postmortem memory of public figures in news and social media

Robert West; Jure Leskovec; Christopher Potts

doi:10.1073/pnas.2106152118

Postmortem memory of public figures in news and social media

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2021 Sep 21;118(38):e2106152118. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2106152118.

Authors

Robert West¹, Jure Leskovec², Christopher Potts³

Affiliations

¹ School of Computer and Communication Sciences, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland; robert.west@epfl.ch.
² Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305.
³ Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305.

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: collective memory; computational social science; forgetting; news and social media analysis.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

Communication
Humans
Mass Gatherings
Mass Media / trends*
Memory
Social Identification*
Social Media / trends*
Sociological Factors