Despite my vast legion of Twitter followers, every one of my attempts to start a new trending topic has failed to catch on.  Now I think I understand why.

Suppose that your goal is to coordinate attention on a topic that seems to be on a lot of minds.  Attention is a scarce resource and you have only a limited number of topics you can highlight.  But suppose, as with Twitter, you see what everyone is talking about.  How do you decide which topics to point to?

You probably shouldn’t just count the total number of people talking on a given subject, counting everyone equally.  You might think that you would instead give extra weight to the few people that everyone is listening to.  Because whatever they say is more likely to be interesting to many, and will soon be on many minds.  On Twitter, those would be the people with the most followers.  But there is a strong case for doing the opposite and giving extra weight to people with few followers, especially people who are relatively isolated in the social network.  This is not out of fairness (or pity) but actually as the efficient way to use your scarce resource.

Efficient coordination means making information public so that not just everyone knows it, but everyone knows that everyone knows it (etc.) If we all have to choose simultaneously what to focus our attention on and we want to be part of the larger conversation, then it matters what we think others are going to focus their attention on.  Coordinating attention thus requires making it public what people are talking about.

Suppose we have two topics that are getting a lot of attention, but topic A is being discussed by well-connected individuals and topic B is being discussed more by a diverse group of isolated individuals.  Topic A is already public because when you see it discussed by a central figure you know that all other of her followers are seeing it to.  Topic B therefore has more to gain from elevating it to the status of trending topic, which immediately makes it public.

I always knew that my Twitter followers were among the wisest. Now I see the true depth of their wisdom.  By adding to my follower numbers, they reduce the weight of my comments in the optimal weighting scheme thus ensuring that the crazy things I say will be ingored by the larger network.  Join the cause.