ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Postmortem memory of public figures in news and social media.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cultural proximity reveals a local premium in collective memory.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Persistence of collective memory of corporate bankruptcy events discussed on X (Twitter) is influenced by pre-bankruptcy public attention.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The fragility of artists' reputations from 1795 to 2020.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- United States politicians' tone became more negative with 2016 primary campaigns.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Poor attention: The wealth and regional gaps in event attention and coverage on Wikipedia.PloS one · 2023Article
- A two-phase model of collective memory decay with a dynamical switching point.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Postmortem memory of public figures in news and social media.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
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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.
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