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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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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!
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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
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
I first became aware of this during the act of using Facebook. A profound sense of fatigue... a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly -- loss of essence. I can assure you it has not reoccurred. Facebook would sense my power and they would seek the life essence. I have since closed my account and I now deny them my essence.
Meme is pronounced similarly to gene. Is that "jeen", "jay nay", or "jee nee"? :)
+1 Precious Bodily Fluids
Wait a minute. I think you're trying to start a meme about how to pronounce meme.
I CALL SHENANIGANS!
Not A Sig
1. Never get involved in a land war in Asia
>p>2. Never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line.
What does that have to do with Facebook? Other than the "death" part?
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
That tag, I don't think it means what you think it means.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Mr. Shenanigans is calling from Soviet Russia on line 1.
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
I remember talking about this word in grade school, oddly enough... It's pronounced "mem meee"
I have two links for you. First, folk etymology is when you try to reconstruct the orgin of the word based on something other than actual research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology
Second, the word meme was coined by Richard Dawkins (a biologist) to explain how ideas can pass from one person to a next and change slightly, just like genes. He says the word is pronounced to rhyme with "gene," and he should know, since he made it up. With all apologies to your grade school classmates, of course.
Oh, here's your second link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
... 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?