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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.
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.
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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
I got tagged by about three friends who were not in contact with each other. A nice demonstration for the Small World hypothesis.
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.
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.
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.
1. I'm not proposing to disallow it. Plus it would be impossible to, anyway. But I can't help feeling like there is something broken about people whose mission in life is to spew trolling cliches or someone else's witticism _long_ after everyone else ceased finding it funny. As I was saying, I think they're the victims in that phenomenon.
2. There is a semantic difference. Pop culture phrases, sayings, etc, have specific meanings and only makes any sense if used in a context where that meaning fits.
To illustrate what I'm trying to say, let's think of the following purely hypothetical example:
Person A: "Cool, I got the phone number of that new girl in sales."
Person B: "You shouldn't cry over spilled milk."
Person A: "Huh? That makes no sense."
Person B: "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth."
What's the wrongest with it isn't the use of the "you shouldn't cry over spilled milk" and "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" cliches, but that they don't fit in that context at all. Semantically they just don't belong there.
That's really my "problem" with some of the meme-spewing retards in the various forums. They aren't just using some phrase to convey a meaning, they're just looking to parrot something that sounded smart once, even if it doesn't even fit the message they're answering to.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
On the flip side, when I wrote mine, I added...
26. I sometimes don't know when to stop.
The CB App. What's your 20?
"Retarded" means "below normal development for its age". Given that, saying that 90% of uses of memes is retarded is a contradiction in terms. The majority of people cannot be retarded, you insensitive clod, not even in Soviet Russia, even if the overlords there arguably were.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I think I understand your point, but I don't really see a problem. I don't think you can make a case that the whole population just mindlessly parrots memes to impress, which is kinda needed for that 90% to translate into 90% of the population.
I do believe that, out in the real world, you'll find that the vast majority of people _don't_ in fact just spew random memes to sound smart. E.g., I've been in plenty of conversations and don't remember anyone going "first reply!" yet. And I've yet to hear anyone going "in Soviet Russia car buys you!" when someone talks about buying a car. Etc.
Let's face it, normal communication may contain clichés and standard phrases, but they're used to convey a very specific meaning, if that expression and meaning fits the conversation at hand. Not just so person X can get to spew supposed meme Y, whether it fits the context or not.
Using some blatantly clichéd expression just because one thinks it made someone else sound smart, is IMHO very much under the normal and expected mental development of anyone over the age of ten or so. We've all been at the stage of parroting the big words mommy uses without much understanding, but then we grew up and out of it. Well, ok, let's say 18, so we don't insult the high-school gangsta hip-hoppers. Yes, about 90% of such use counts as retarded in my book, in precisely the sense you write: it falls below what I would expect from the mental abilities and processes of an adult. And I don't think that the whole population does that.
Then again, after seeing too many marketing texts that use "leverage" instead of "use", and "synergy" without saying between what and what, etc, just because some drone thought it sounds smarter and more educated... I can see your point too. Hmm. Maybe I have too high expectations of an average person's mental development.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.