On Urban Event Tracking from Online Media: A Social Cognition Perspective

Modern online media, such as Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, democratized information broadcast, allowing anyone to offer content for large-scale dissemination. The resulting global accessibility of real-time information marked an unprecedented change in human history. It ushered-in an age of information overload and introduced fundamentally new content dissemination dynamics within a very short period of time compared to that necessary for our cognitive faculties to co-evolve. In the meantime, the public nature of offered information allows automated tools to observe not only what is being transmitted but also how it propagates. Actual diffusion of information is driven by recepients, who must individually prioritize what to consume and propagate in the face of mounting overload. The resulting propagation patterns offer insights into the collective cognitive choices made by the underlying population. Automated algorithms can harvest these insights to offer added value to the population at hand. One example is content curation (or recommendation) services that help users sift through increasingly larger amounts of information clutter to find the most relevant and interesting items. We argue that contemporary information distillation services that manage overload can lead to significant negative side-effects that may range from unintentional suppression of pertinent information to the undermining of the very foundations of modern democracy. This paper explains the mechanism by which these side effects occur and explores possible research directions surrounding the mitigation of such side effects, set in the context of urban event tracking applications.