  Human attention becomes an increasingly important resource for our
understanding or collective human behaviors in the age of information
explosion. To better understand the flow of collective attention, we construct
the attention flow network using anonymous smartphone data of 100,000 users in
a major city of China. In the constructed network, nodes are websites visited
by users, and links denote the switch of users between two websites. We
quantify the flow of collective attention by computing the flow network
statistics, such as flow impact, flow dissipation, and flow distance. The
findings reveal a strong concentration and fragmentation of collective
attention for smartphone users, while the duplication of attention cross
websites proves to be unfounded in mobile using. We further confirmed the law
of dissipation and the allowmetric scaling of flow impact. Surprisingly, there
is a centralized flow structure, suggesting that the website with large traffic
can easily control the circulated collective attention. Additionally, we find
that flow network analysis can effectively explain the page views and sale
volume of products. Finally, we discuss the benefits and limitations of using
the flow network analysis for computational communication research.
