Indiana University Researchers Get $1 Million Grant To Study Memes

An anonymous reader writes with news that the NSF has just awarded a group of researchers a grant to study the life cycle of memes. "Indiana University is receiving nearly $1 million in federal grant money to investigate the genesis, spread, and demise of Internet memes. The grant from the National Science Foundation awards four Indiana researchers $919,917 to for a project called Truthy that will, as the grant's abstract explains, "explore why some ideas cause viral explosions while others are quickly forgotten." (And yes, in case you're wondering, the name was inspired by Stephen Colbert's neologism "truthiness.") The government-funded research is aimed at identifying which memes are organic and which ones are mere astroturf. "While the vast majority of memes arise in a perfectly organic manner, driven by the complex mechanisms of life on the Web, some are engineered by the shady machinery of high-profile congressional campaigns," Truthy's About page explains."

Comments

I know some good memes they can study

[Quarters]

Up the road at Purdue University there are always quite a lot of memes about Indiana University. They're all really negative, so that might affect the study results.

Re:Let me help them

[fisted]

Look, there are over 9000 memes, but your list doesn't contain any.

One does not simply get paid to surf the Web

[Brewmeister_Z]

I don't always get paid to surf the Web but when I do, I make sure to get a grant that could have gone to a better cause...

Interesting.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

One doesn't have to see the value in stuff that isn't immediately applicable R&D(and I'm not here to debate the point, do as you will); but if you are OK with the concept of such research this actually seems like a pretty good idea:

The question of how and why ideas, 'culture', religions, new scientific hypotheses, etc. are transmitted and compete with one another is really a very long standing one. A lot of the historical study emphasizes 'elite' culture and theory(mostly because everything else was oral record only, and that doesn't keep well; but written works sometimes survive) or religious(high frequency of literacy, and proselytizing is a technology of considerable interest to contemporary religions); but there is also study of popular culture, folk mythologies, what the middle and lower classes were reading and watching(once that became common), and so on.

Cultural transmission is a very solid social science topic, and internet memes have the dual virtues of both potentially being novel(they might actually follow some traditional propagation pattern, might be something new, either way would be interesting to know) and being amenable to large-scale analysis because the internet is just so conveniently searchable and heavily cached in various places. You don't have to like the entire field; but this research project seems like a perfectly reasonable exercise.

Re:LOL ....

[itsdapead]

I, for one, welcome our new meme-studying overlords.

In Soviet Russia, memes study you!

Another pile of nostalgic /. memes

[tepples]

Emacs vs. vi vs. viper-mode fence sitters, GNOME vs. KDE, Bill Gates as a Borg, Get Some Priorities (after a major natural disaster or terrorist attack), Less space than a Nomad, .page .widening, my UID is lower than yours, Stephen King is dead, You fail it, You insensitive clod, early versions of Mac OS X (later Windows Vista) taking 20 minutes to copy a 17 MB file, will we see it before Duke Nukem Forever (which became "before Valve releases 3" once DNF finally came out), "Taco snotting" and other slashfic, RTFA (read the fucking article) and its bowdlerization to "the featured article"...

3 steps. No, 4.

[drainbramage]

1: Find idiots in government handing out other peoples money (redundant)
2: Apply for grant
3: ???
4: Profit

The federal deficit this year is $550 billion

[NotDrWho]

This year the federal government moved $550 billion closer to default and the collapse of the dollar.

Just thought I would point that out, since it seems relevant.

Re:The federal deficit this year is $550 billion

[Dutch Gun]

Oh, it's absolutely relevant. I don't care if I get modded off-topic. I've got plenty of karma.

Quite frankly, this sort of stuff is insane when we're continuously running a massive deficit. No one likes to hear this, but we really need to crank down the government spigot at so many levels it's no longer even funny. We simply don't have the money to be spending on what I'll generously term "discretionary" research. It's not just grants either, which admittedly take up a very small portion of the budget.

The military budget is out of control. Yes, we live in a dangerous world, but we need to ask the rest of the civilized nations to help share the burden a bit (and this is coming from a somewhat conservative hawk), or perhaps scale back our overseas adventures. Our social program expenditures and pensions are ballooning even worse than military spending. We just passed another hugely expensive entitlement (health care reform), but with no regard to how the government is going to pay for it without crippling increases in taxes, deficit spending, or inflationary money printing. The NSA is spending billions to harvest and process all the data on the internet passing through the US for questionable benefits and even more questionable legality.

The federal government has demonstrated time and time and time again that they can't be trusted to balance the budget in a fiscally responsible manner. It's always more politically expedient to pass the buck to the next generation, and when the time comes to really tackle the problem, it's going to be really painful for everyone. Federal spending money is power, and that power is apparently just too damned addictive to resist. It would be best to deal with it as soon as possible and in a responsible manner over time, just like with any debt incurred.

A few other nations have been hopping on the constitutional balanced budget requirement. Maybe it's time to join them? I haven't quite made up my mind, but I'm definitely leaning towards support right now. A number of Keynsian economists argue against it, saying that it's best to allow deficit spending in bad economic times, but seeing as we never seem to STOP deficit spending in recent years, it's hard to make that argument with a straight face.

Re:The federal deficit this year is $550 billion

[serviscope_minor]

Quite frankly, this sort of stuff is insane when we're continuously running a massive deficit.

No, not even slightly. The reason you're running a massive defecit is because you have dumped trillions into two pointless wars and the military industrial complex. It was such a dumb idea that even previous presidents have warned about such things.

Cutting back on basic research is a sure-fire way to hobble long term future development. The only way to do this successfully and on the scale and longevity required is via government funding.

etc...

Yes government spending is out of control. About the worst way of reignin it in is to cut down on basic research.

Re:The federal deficit this year is $550 billion

[Dutch Gun]

Did you not even read my post? I'm agreeing with you about the military spending - it's a massive part of the federal budget. I'll even quote myself for your benefit, so you don't have to do all that pesky reading before typing up a reply.

The military budget is out of control. Yes, we live in a dangerous world, but we need to ask the rest of the civilized nations to help share the burden a bit (and this is coming from a somewhat conservative hawk), or perhaps scale back our overseas adventures.

And how exactly is meme investigation "basic research"? I'd really like to know how cutting frivolous grants like this will damage future meme propagation on the internet. I'm perfectly fine with federal dollars being judiciously spent on science which may have a real impact on our society or fundamental technology, or even of our understanding of the universe. This isn't it.

A million dollars is a tiny percentage of our federal budget, but that doesn't mean we should be pissing it away when we don't have a lot of excess money floating around.

Re:Memes = Politics?

[bill_mcgonigle]

The odd part of this story is when it says:

some are engineered by the shady machinery of high-profile congressional campaigns

yet I'm failing to think of even one example of a viral meme that fits into that category. I mean, yeah, trigger words for government funding and all that, but even one?

If somebody wants to tell me that Nanci Pelosi's people came up with Doge, OK, fine, I'd believe it, but I've never heard any such insinuations.

Real Reason for funding this

[Perl-Pusher]

From the extract:
"This service could mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect hate speech and subversive propaganda, and assist in the preservation of open debate. "
Or more aptly:
"This service could mitigate free speech, detect anything we don't agree with and allow us to control the message"

Re:Real Reason for funding this

[wonkey_monkey]

Or maybe they do just want to do what they say, and they don't have a shadowy agenda.

Re:Memes = Politics?

[xdor]

Which is why I suggest the grant money to study memes is really to fund a high-profile congressional campaign's viral marketing budget, using this pretense of "testing" political memes. Especially, if by some coincidence, the memes tested are for said high-profile congressional campaign.

Either that or the article is just trolling...

Who invented the neologism meme?

[lippydude]

Richard Dawkins invented meme specifically in relation to religion, in his book The Selfish Gene.