CSSS 2009 Santa Fe-Projects & Working Groups

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Brainstorming

• Disease ecology of media hype. How much and event gets covered in the news often appears to depends on how much it is already covered in the news. Often this distorts reality. For example, the number of searches for "swine flu" (a proxy for media hype), do not reflect the patterns of disease spread over the same period.

Google searches for "swine flu"

Actual number of swine flu cases over the same period

While the number of flu cases increased, the searches died off, as interest in the topic waned. It would be interesting to follow the origin, spread and extinction of media hype, maybe applying models commonly used to study the spread of disease.