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.