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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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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
+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!
If the "25 Things" meme was akin to a light flu, then the damn Soviet Russia meme must be like the virus from 28 Days Later.
I only hope that it too causes the host to eventually die of starvation.
I hate printers.
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.
In Soviet Russia memes spread you!
Apologies. I'll get my coat.