The universal decay of collective memory

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How We’ll Forget John Lennon
Our culture has two types of forgetting.

By Kevin Berger January 10, 2019

Last month Hidalgo and colleagues published a Nature paper that put his crafty data-mining talents to work on another question: How do people and products drift out of the cultural picture? They traced the fade-out of songs, movies, sports stars, patents, and scientific publications. They drew on data from sources such as Billboard, Spotify, IMDB, Wikipedia, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and the American Physical Society, which has gathered information on physics articles from 1896 to 2016. Hidalgo’s team then designed mathematical models to calculate the rate of decline of the songs, people, and scientific papers.

The report, “The universal decay of collective memory and attention,” concludes that people and things are kept alive through “oral communication” from about five to 30 years. They then pass into written and online records, where they experience a slower, longer decline. The paper argues that people and things that make the rounds at the water cooler have a higher probability of settling into physical records. “Changes in communication technologies, such as the rise of the printing press, radio and television,” it says, affect our degree of attention, and all of our cultural products, from songs to scientific papers, “follow a universal decay function.”

That's interesting, but I wouldn't mind seeing the full paper to see their reasoning and definitions.

As it happens, someone once did something similiar with Christianity. I wrote about it on my blog.

In 1699 a man named Johanne Craig wrote a book, "Theologiæ Christianæ Principia Mathematica," which included a section on how long Christianity was expected to last. From my blog:

"If the evidence had only been oral, Craig calculated that it would've ended in 800AD but since it was written down, he estimated it will continue until 3150AD (and, in fairness to him, so far so good). And this is the year in which Craig predicted the second coming."

The book is available on Google Books, but only in Latin.

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I wouldn't mind seeing the full paper to see their reasoning and definitions.

Here it is.