Slashdot Mirror
A Quantitative Study of How Memes Spread
rememberclifford writes "A survey of about 3,000 people who were tagged in a '25 Random Things About Me' note on Facebook found that memes spread through social networks in a remarkably similar way as diseases do. A biologist who looked at the data says that '"25 Things" authors can be seen as "contagious" under what's known as a "susceptible-infected-recovered" model for the spread of disease,' with a propagation factor of 0.27 in this case. But like an infection, the whole thing died out as quickly as it exploded once the number of 'victims' — people who were willing to write 25 things about themselves — was depleted." The '25 Things' meme was at least as annoying as a light flu.
over 9,000.
I think the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell explained how this happens well. He said there are three rules for this kind of spreading of fads... the law of the few, stickiness factor and the power of context.
I won't repeat it all, however it seems to me that the best memes have a few central people, with lots of friends, who spread it around. Malcolm spends a great deal of time giving examples of how fads and trends all start by getting to one of these well connected communicators. His first example is of Paul Revere.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
I don't feel this was particularly annoying. I'm "friends" with quite a few people I don't know, and reading people's seems a pretty decent way of quickly getting to know someone, and what they're like. Similar to those "Where would you be right now if you had the choice" profiles on dating sites.
The "25 Things" meme reminded me of the chain emails that were ever so popular in the early to mid 90s. I wonder how the "rate of infection" on face book compares to a similar meme delivered by email. Specifically, I wonder if the public nature of "25 Things" invitations on facebook enhance its ability to be transmitted from one victim to another. Email is generally read in a very private way, where facebook invitations happen in front of your entire (online) social network.
Any thoughts on this?
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
...never heard of it being called 'viral' for this explicit reason.
Is this a Rick Romano report?
I always suspected there was something infectious about facebook..
It seems to follow the herpes model too. Once you got it. It's forever!
I got tagged by about three friends who were not in contact with each other. A nice demonstration for the Small World hypothesis.
1. Someone posts something that's funny because it involves shared cultural reference and experience for that community.
2. It gets modded up +5 funny.
3. ???
4. Profit!
My blog
It's a trap!
Summation 2
were those of us who kept having those stupid "25 things" posts pop up on our facebook home page from people we hardly know...
Do you have ESP?
The word memes looks alot like herpes. I've learned alot from this article, like not to skim the slashdot headlines.
Males will only have filled it in and passed it on if it was sent to them by a girl they want to sleep with, so it's more like some sort of sexually transmitted infection than flu.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
That's more of a chain letter, though; a meme that explicitly instructs that it be copied onward. That's nothing new, we've had chain letters for a hundred years or more, and religions for millennia. That's cheating. I'd be interested in seeing a study of the spread of a more passive meme, of which I'm sure there are over 9000 examples, at least in Soviet Russia. How do ideas spread among a population organically, without this lame 'now forward to all your friends' thing? Something along the lines of Dawkins' original study of citations of a scientific paper, and how they increase slowly as the meme spreads and then suddenly increase rapidly after some critical point. The same could be done with internet memes: perhaps an index of how many non-/b/tards are using a meme as an indicator of its popularity. Or indeed with fashion trends; I understand that some marketing firms have been known to identify the alpha child in a given playground and straight-out bribe him to wear their brands...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The real question remains unanswered: Just how do you pronounce "meme"?
The dictionary says "meem", but I hear "may-may" and "me-me" often.
Since when is Meme the new word for Chain Letter?
...are the pseudo-journalists/analysts still writing stories using the word "meme."
You guys are finally catching up to me.
http://www.realmeme.com/Main/theory101/index.jsp
Here's the mechanism for Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine"....
http://www.realmeme.com/Main/theory101/diffraction.jsp
You can determine patient zero entry points, periods of susceptibility, etc, through simple keyword counts and some semantic analysis.
This just in: a method of studying the spread of ideas that attempts to use viral disease as it's model finds that ideas spread like viral disease.
-- $G
Memes can turn into a serious problem for society. Fortunately our future Martian overlords know just how to deal with it, as witnessed here. This is why it is imperative that we visit Mars and set up colonies there...
Rules 1 and 2, brothers.
Meme is pronounced similarly to gene. Is that "jeen", "jay nay", or "jee nee"? :)
Doesn't meme mean some sort of belief? Not a type of post on Facebook.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Break out the distilled water and grain alcohol!
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
The biggest difference is that you can choose to not be "contagious" when it comes to forwarding your annoying "disease" onto someone else. If only the flu appeared as a douchebag with a popped collar, I would feel so much better right now.
Making those graphs into Flash animations provided zero useful information, as is typical for flash snippets.
I want to find "patient zero" for the idea that animating the drawing of a static graph was cool, and go back in time and force-feed him a copy of "The Visual Display of Qualitative Information" until he's coughing up statistics.
"Quantitative", you idiot.
14 year olds on 4chan rule teh interwebs.
... are the dolts who still repeat something that sounded cool or smart when it was new, but in the meantime it's just retarded and offtopic. It's the people who, many years later, still think there's something clever or even shocking about a rickrolling (it was at least a pun when someone turned "duckrolling" into "rickrolling", but I doubt that most of the retards still doing it these days even know that), or even about the ever popular goatse link (we've all seen it already, there's hardly any shock value left in it), or talking in wikipedia tags ("[citation needed]" was witty when someone first spouted it, but in the meantime it just says "I'm too retarded to talk in complete sentences _or_ come up with an original witticism of my own"), or pretty much 99% of the phrases being recirculated. There's nothing witty, original, funny or shocking about being the millionth mindless clone using someone else's joke or wisecrack any more, but some people just can't seem to recover anyway.
Like in the infecection analogy, the healthy minds have dealt with it and moved on. The ones with a broken immune system (except in this case it's the IQ;) are still stuck with it after years, and still icapable of doing much more than spew more copies of the virus.
Honestly, I find these even more pityful than a journalist writing about memes once and then moving on.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I thought that by ignoring all that crap I was being my usual antisocial self. But it turns out, I'm actually like a naturally immune member of the population.
How is memme formed?
I enjoyed it very much, thank you.
Me! Me! Meeeeeeeeeeee!!!!
Isn't memetics dead, or at least no longer of interest? I thought the main journal had shut down and Susan Blackmore et al had moved on.
Visit the
Is it too soon to remind everyone that the Ice Stone has melted?
These memes are spreading like wildfire. Has anyone notified the CDC?
I'm actually immune to email spam and chain letters. I didn't have enough exposure to Facebook to build up an immunity. I tried to fight it off and waited several weeks, but after about five people I knew sent me one of these I found myself writing one and sending it off to other people to spread the infection further.
Now I've seen a few other note memes like this and I don't feel compelled to follow. I think my immunity has kicked in.
I think we can blame Moron to Moron interactions. I mean really- what is worse? The 'meme' itself or the person you actually took the time to fill it out and post it?
"The '25 Things' meme was at least as annoying as a light flu."
Why did this phenomenon annoy people? Were you not free to abstain from it on every level? Don't want to read someone's 25 things? How about you don't! Don't want to post 25 of your own things? How about you don't!
There was an article on time.com where the author felt the need to rant about 25 things. How she didn't want to find out all those horribly personal things about people. How it was annoying. DON'T READ THEM, MORON.
I've actually enjoyed reading all of the 25 things for people I care about. I didn't read them for people I wasn't interested in, as I imagine people who were interested in mine didn't read them.
Grow a brain people. Your life will be much better for it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In case anyone cares, I resisted this plague.
So, your claim to glory is having found a foreigner that spells worse than you?
At least I have the excuse that my mother tongue is nothing like English, and I'm writing this in Opera without a spell checker. If a spelling nazi has found only two words to pick on, I'll take that as a major compliment. Thanks.
So what's _your_ achievement and claim to glory that you wished to share there? That you can spell in your native language? That even in that skill, you need to compare yourself to the inherent bottom of the barrel (something who isn't a native English speaker) to feel good about yourself?
Congrats. If you need that, then you're officially a worthless waste of sperm. In Bill Hicks's words, "you should have been a blowjob." Thanks for sharing your worthlesness with us all. I appreciate it, really.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
wait till you see how much religion has in common with a mental disease or a parasite
Tell all your friends.
memes don't force people to actually write something.
memes are totally passive. you click a link and view information. then maybe you click another link to propagate it.
This doesn't take into account so-called super-spreaders. Those who have the potential to propagate to hundreds of thousands of people just by their status.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I don't think anyone ever could have guessed in a billion years that contagion models could be applied to internet memes. And heaven forbid someone spend some time examining their life and writing about it in an entertaining way instead of throwing sheep at all their friends.
An immune non-carrier.
Typically this presents as one of two phenomenons:
"Contact Immunity" where an individual is immune, and their immunity is contagious. Usually this is a response to a vaccination. The weakened strain of the vaccination is still contagious, and so spreads through the population stopping the spread of the original disease.
Or so called "Herd Immunity" where an immune population is large enough to block transmission vectors between non-immune members. Person A gets sick, but dies/gets better before they run into anyone who isn't immune.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Take a look at this video from the it crowd...
No, I genuinely mean retarded. It's not a case of "I don't like them", it's a case of "most of the time it doesn't even make sense, nor make them look as smart as they seem to think." Some 90% of the uses of memes don't actually even have any meaning, and certainly don't convey any information in the context they're used.
E.g., a decade later all the "first post" posts stopped being new, witty or funny, and basically just say "I'm a troll adding noise to the signal, and can't even think of anything original either." There are _very_ few instances where they're on topic. (E.g., maybe a discussion about such posts.) Far from being a claim to being witty or funny, it's basically a claim of being a dumb and unimaginative troll. Why _would_ someone who's not retarded actually want to make that claim in public?
E.g., in Soviet Russia. The original joke was something like, "in the USA you find a party on a Saturday night, in Soviet Russia the party finds you." It was a clever word-play on the two meanings of the word "party". That was actually the funny part: that switching the meanings too, not just the word around. Many years later, enter the common Slashdot troll. He got the word switching right, but not the part where it's actually a pun or otherwise witty or funny. So what are they trying to prove there? That they have about enough brain to switch words around, but not enough to do the joke right, or even understand what the joke was? I.e., about as much as a parrot?
And again, in which contexts is it even remotely relevant? I'll cut it a lot of slack in threads which actually do mention the USSR or Russia, like the orbital collision earlier, even if they manage to get it executed the usual way that misses the whole joke. But otherwise it's just some off-topic noise that's not even funny or witty. Yay, someone butted in a topic about server clusters, to post an "in Soviet Russia computers cluster you." That's so funny without the actual word-play, and he's so smart and witty. Not.
E.g., I won't complain about our AC friend for the "tl;dr" meme in this thread, and would probably even mod him funny myself, because it _is_ a thread about memes. Fair enough. He found an overused meme to post in a thread about overused memes. That's cool.
But it's also popping up all over the place, in all threads, and sometimes to messages 3-4 sentences long. What clever insight is it supposed to impart there? Because from where I stand, it just makes the claim, "hey, look at me! I'm not here to actually read! I'm here to skip directly to trolling! And I'm too stupid to understand that nobody asked _me_ to read it anyway, or to use the back button!" It's something that might make sense on something that you're _supposed_ to read, like a memo at work, but just proves lack of elementary intelligence on a forum where nobody gives a rat's arse about who reads exactly which message. That a completely random John Doe found a random message too long for his broken attention span, is simply a non-issue and non-information.
Even as a trolling devices go, it seems to me like a pretty retarded one. It doesn't even say much about the message or poster it's answering to, but just about the one who posted it. As such, it lacks even much of an annoyance value or baiting value. So some guy just confessed that he's here just to troll and/or can't read more than a paragraph. So what? Should I send him a coupon for ADHD treatement, or what?
Etc.
I'm not talking about a matter of subjective tastes, but about what I consider genuinely a failure of logic and/or intelligence.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I thought that memes were ideas that spread virally. For example, "The world trade centers were brought down by the United States government as a false flag operation." would be a meme. On the other hand, a survey on Facebook isn't really a meme... is it?
Shampoo.
If it was "some minor politcian" - one of those 3 selectmen or something - I might. Someone that gutsy to look the tabloids in the eye for 10 years would be immune to the typical brand of political pressure.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The Ice Stone has melted!
I think for a lot of my "friends", 25 Things was the first participatory internet meme they have been exposed to, at least on that kind of scale. (Aside from the Facebook meta-meme, of course.) I get the impression that many non-geek Facebook members haven't really been part of an online community in any meaningful way before (I'm 38, so this is a Gen-X thing.)
I certainly hope that they aren't quite so susceptible to the next meme that comes along, although I think some of them genuinely enjoyed it.
Hi Hemos! LTNS!
Wrong opposite. He's looking for the term for someone who gets the disease, becomes symptomatic and recovers, but is not at any time contagious. I don't know that there is such a term.
Maybe you should include a description of what a meme is first. Or am I the only one who doesn't use and never heard anyone speak this word before?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
...in that you're more likely to catch them from someone you either want to or have already shagged?
Guilty =(
(meme, not diseases)
Two of my friends died from catching contagious memes.
please, what is meme?
old news is so exciting
human is virus......
u know now?
i knew b4
You know, I'm pretty sure this could safely be classified as a "social disease..."
You just spent about 3 minutes having an internal monologue about how best to weave the hated word into a reply, without it being too obvious or douchey. Then you spelled it wrong...
I have LOLCAT fever.
I'm not sure why so much is being made of this '25 Random Things About Me' note on facebook. It is just a variation on an old parlor game that never really "came and went". Some people want to play, others don't. Yes, there are meme-y elements to virtually everything in a culture, but would an invitation to a kegger, superbowl party, LAN party, or a poker game be given such careful meme-y analysis? I'm not saying someone shouldn't analyze those things in this framework, but it seems this '25 Random Things About Me' note is being treated as a wild fad (some kind of canonical meme flash and burn) although it is really no different than some people at a large BBQ deciding to play poker while others play frisbee.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi