PREDICTING THE DIFFUSION OF INFORMATION TO MASS AUDIENCES.

Information diffusion is the process by which information spreads through a population. There are many types of information, many types of populations and many diffusion mechanisms. From the standpoint of sheer bulk of information diffused, the most prevalent diffusion process in operation today is probably from the mass media to mass audiences. News events are, if not necessarily the most important type of information at least the easiest to study while diffusing, since they have definite starting points in time and are generally easy to comprehend and define. A number of studies have traced the diffusion of major news events over time and have noted regularities in the way that news events diffuse. Several attempts have been made to apply mathematical models to the process of information diffusion. It can be shown that diffusion theoretically can be predicted as a function of probabilities of audience exposure to the disseminating media over a series of time increments, provided that several assumptions are met.