Moving In The Knowledge Space:The Attention Flow In Mobile Reading Behavior

We have entered the era of "Mobile Reading".Nowadays people spend more and more time reading on mobile devices.Usually,people's lifestyle determines the availability of their spare time,which further determines their personalized reading interests and preferences.Reading remains one of the most important ways to knowledge and learning.People tend to use a variety of mobile reading applications to read and learn from the mobile knowledge space,which in turn will shape the lives and working conditions of themselves.This study examines the characteristics of media consumption behavior in the new era from the perspective of attention flow.Using all the book data on a mobile reading platform(more than 280,000,covering almost all categories),we have the opportunity to study the structure of the audience's attention in the mobile knowledge space,which can be built on the entire book market.A person's reading behavior can be seen as the process of moving in the knowledge space,which,in another word,is the flow of attention.By constructing the attention-flow network,we find that the network has a centralized structure,suggesting that there is a high degree of concentration in the audience's attention.From the perspective of the total number of readers and the total reading time occupied by each book,the distributions have significant long-tailed characteristics.In another word,there are small number of popular book with large amount of readers(at the head)and the length of time they have been read is proportionally large.On the contrary,most of the books are read by a much smaller group of readers and the length of time they were spent reading is correspondingly small(at the tail).In all,it shows highly unequal consumption of different books.In addition,the phenomenon of Audience Duplication between head and tail books is weak.That is to say,there is little audience overlap between the reader groups who read popular books and the reader groups who read niche books.They are forming different and independent reading preferences.Further research findings show that the relationship between the spatial and temporal structure of the audience's attention and their social class.Claiming that iOS users and Android users representing the higher and lower social class(relatively speaking)in the society,we find significant differences in reading behavior between the two group of readers.First,there is a significant difference in the breadth of reading interest between the two.74%of Android users are highly interested in 20%(3 out of 15 categories)entertainment book and pay less in all,while 26%of iOS users' reading interests are widely distributed in more than 80%of books(most of them are for self-promotion),and they pay more for it.Moreover,we also found that there are differences in the daily reading habits of the two group of users.By measuring the "burst" pattern that emerged in the time series of hourly reading behavior each day,it can be found that,on average,readers with higher social class have more regular reading during the day,while for readers with lower social class,the reading activities are more explosive and much more influenced by the structure of daily routine(such as commuting,working time and the three meals a day).Finally,in order to further reveal the relationship between the spatial and temporal structures of audience' attention,we use entropy to measure the extent of fragmentation of attention flow.By calculating the entropy of the reading intervals,durations and the entropy of the book category,we find that there is a significant correlation between the fragmentation of reading content and reading time among readers.The above research findings have somehow provided us with a complete picture of the reproduction of social class.The data analysis shows that individuals from different social class are highly affected by their daily life style and working time structure,and their free time for reading will be different.Moreover,the fragmentation of reading time is usually accompanied by the fragmentation of reading content.As reading can shape people's thinking and characteristics,the differences may ultimately lead to the reproduction of social class.In another word,as people with higher social classes have more time,they tend to read books on self-promotion and maintain a positive and progressive attitude,while those with lower social class,being highly "structured" by daily life,are often more likely to read some entertainment books to enjoy and kill time.To a larger extent,the differences between these two reading patterns may become an important part of the reproduction process of social class.