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.

Comments

Technically it's an STI

[onion2k]

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.

Memes and Disease

[salesgeek]

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.

Actually, the REAL victims IMHO

[Moraelin]

... 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.

Re:Actually, the REAL victims IMHO

[corbettw]

Lighten up, Francis. Witty catchphrases and bon mots have always found a way to enter the language; some die out, some continue for centuries or even millennia. After all, there's nothing new under the sun, and a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Yes, some turn into tired cliches, and I agree with you that rickrolling needs to die. But if you disallowed people from using popculture catch phrases years after they were originally cool, you'd gut out about half of the language (and inadvertently cancel Family Guy).