Web Users Live in a Different Space of Attention
Does a piece news receive more attention on the web or on traditional media? It's an important question, because it makes you ponder about the influence the container has on content, as well as about the differences between the old and the new world for content producers.
The front page or the opening news report are the most coveted spaces on newspapers and news programs and the competition is high to get there. If a piece of news is put on the front page, it gets more attention from readers, and it is more influential over their judgments on political issues, the quality of the newspaper, etc.
The structure of traditional information is rigid: once the layout or the news summary is set, the news are there to be absorbed in a standard way by readers and viewers. The Internet is very different from this model. Once the information is uploaded, it can be classified in multifarious ways. If a traditional news article on a daily is usually labeled by editors as "metro", "politics", or "sports", on the web the articled can be labeled according to keywords chosen by the editing room, say "Lampedusa", "migrants", but this taxonomy can be enriched by the keywords chosen by the readers, such as "poor", "north africa", etc.
Taxonomic criteria affect the searchabilty of information and augment the possibility of locating something that could be easily lost in the online ocean.
Newspapers have hundreds of pages online, blogs are many more, users' comments on articles are in thousands. The cognitive ability to digest and analyze all this is variable, but usually much lower that the one needed to order all the quantity of information we are talking about. Thus, for an other, competing for the reader's attention on the Internet is not the same as competing to get one's article on the front page.
The space of attention on the web is a different concept from what prevails in the offline world. For instance, Balotelli has a fight in a Manchester pub and this is listed on the Gazzetta dello Sport's homepage. Then Bolt improves his 100-meter world record and Balotelli loses his first position on the page. At some point, Balotelli's mischief disappears from the homepage, and is no longer in the space of attention of the reader.
On social networks the space of attention is limited too. On your homepage, Facebook shows what are friends are doing or saying. For instance Giorgio says: "Today, tortellini bonanza", while Max says "The Barolo I drank today was outstanding".
When the space on the main feed on Facebook's homepage ends, the earlier comments disappear leaving space to more recent comment, according to a First In First Out logic. And if I didn't log onto Facebook for a few hours, I'd never have known that Massimiliano had good wine today.
On the Internet, the space of attention is thus a cognitive, rather than a physical concept. It is affected by the difficulty to search for useful information and by the technical constraints of web pages. This leads to a different way of seizing the attention of the reader and leads the reader himself/herself to adopt reading patterns that are different from the past. This kind of digital behavior is the social legacy of Internet technology and is a major research subject if one wants to understand this brave new world.