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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.
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.
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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 always suspected there was something infectious about facebook..
It seems to follow the herpes model too. Once you got it. It's forever!
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
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?
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"? :)
"Quantitative", you idiot.
Memes are a sociological phenomenon, and are studied seriously by sociologists.
Not that I think sociology is a proper science, mind you, but it's still something that should be and has been studied seriously.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
... 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?
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.