Can Interactive Dual Fields of Information Explain the Prevalent Phenomena

Abstract

The occurrence of prevalent phenomena is an almost unclear but interesting subject for us. Here we have constructed a dual model of information fields originated from the news media and showed that the quasi-cyclic appearance of prevalence can be explained by such a model. The homogeneous field of information around us was assumed, which is composed of the real field originated from the primary media such as newspapers and the television, and the cyber field from the PC and smart phones. The latter field is of the SNS cyber world affected by the field of real world. The public was assumed to be influenced simultaneously by these two types of fields to result in the enhancement of the awareness of some specific things. To investigate the viability of such a dual model, inputting the data of the real field regarding the global warming (GW) already reported in Japan as an external variable, the feature was derived in what manner the public awareness of GW had varied during the past ~35 years. The high public awareness was found to be realized at around 2009 when the information environment was explosively enhanced in the real world. Such enhancement of the awareness could be explained by the contribution from the cyber field, which was brought by the instability of the field, or a burst, induced by a small perturbation from the real field. A possibility was pointed out that the spontaneous occurrence of quasi-cyclic instability such as the case of our explosive awareness could take place in the interactive dual system of information between the real and cyber fields. We pointed out that the spontaneous occurrence of prevalence in general could be explained also by the similar mechanism as ours.

Modelling the Influence of Social Media on Collective Opinion

“…The information environment surrounding our lives is in a form of a superposed state of the real world originating from newspapers, the television and direct human relations, and the cyber world from the Internet and SNS so that the public opinion or the recognition are formed under the integrated influence of these two worlds [6]. Here the cyber world means the virtual space of which a main function is the information exchange through the SNS such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc.…”