  This paper establishes a Markov chain model as a unified framework for
understanding information consumption processes in complex networks, with clear
implications to the Internet and big-data technologies. In particular, the
proposed model is the first one to address the formation mechanism of the
"trichotomy" in observed probability density functions from empirical data of
various social and technical networks. Both simulation and experimental results
demonstrate a good match of the proposed model with real datasets, showing its
superiority over the classical power-law models.
