Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts

Sunday, 19 January 2014

The evolution of memes on Facebook

Facebook data science seem to have got into memes recently.

Here's their 2014 article, The evolution of memes on Facebook, by Lada Adamic, Thomas Lento, Eytan Adar and Pauline Ng. There's a PDF.

The authors explicitly go after some of the basic questions in memetics, writing:

So can memes really be modeled as genes? After all, Richard Dawkins originally coined the word "meme” to draw the analogy to genes when describing how ideas or messages replicate and evolve. How would one test the hypothesis that memes undergo a process akin to biological evolution? First, tracing biological evolution is notoriously difficult because one must discern the lineage of specific genetic sequences through generations, without having the genetic sequence of many intermediate instances. But when studying Facebook memes, we have a very unique opportunity to actually trace when copies and mutations occurred, and these are the two basic ingredients in the evolutionary process.

They conclude:

We’ve observed a number of remarkable parallels between how information evolves in a social network and how genes evolve. Drawing these parallels simply hasn’t been possible before for lack of large-scale data containing the evolution histories of many memes. Here we examined near-complete traces of hundreds of memes, collectively comprising over 460 million individual instances. Although the study is limited to just the Facebook context, and just on format of meme (textual status updates), we believe it provides useful insight into the behavior of ideas transmitted via social ties in general.

Here's one of the images from the article. The caption says: "A tree showing the lineage of each variant of the 'no one should' meme".


Saturday, 18 February 2012

Meme faces in Facebook chat

Facebook has added dozens of meme faces to their chat and message systems.

To use them you type codes like this in:

  • Poker face [[129627277060203]]
  • Forever alone [[227644903931785]]
  • OK guy [[100002752520227]]
  • Me Gusta [[164413893600463]]
  • LOL guy [[189637151067601]]
  • Trollface [[171108522930776]]
They seem a bit small and pixellated to me. A list of popular codes is here.

Apparently these are profile IDs - not really part of a deliberate meme push by Facebook. Demonstration:

Friday, 9 December 2011

Facebook persists with their "memology" nonsense

I told Facebook this time last year that the study of memes is not called "memology".

Yet still they persist with their nonsense. Oh well. Their video is above. Their "memology" page is here.

An engineer claims that things like the death of Steve Jobs, Amy Winehouse and Gadaffi are not down to a "viral effect" - whereas status updates such as "like my status" are - because the deaths are current affairs events that people just happen to be simultaneously talking about. That seems to be a confused perspective, it seems to me. Both spread in a similar "epidemiological" manner. It would be reasonable to classify meme "virality" according to whether the content was deleterious to its host or not - but surely not like this.

Tuesday, 14 December 2010

Memology is not a word!

Facebook have recently been attempting to coin a new term, "memology".

They define "memology" here as follows:

"Memology" refers to the study of how "memes," or new ideas and trends, are spreading on Facebook.
Sorry, Facebook, "memology" is not a word. It is an attempt at marketing - and one of those nasty ones that pollutes the language.

Sunday, 26 July 2009

Charles Darwin Tagged You in a Note on Facebook

The link: Charles Darwin Tagged You in a Note on Facebook

Subtitle: The evolutionary roots of Facebook's "25 Things" craze.

It is an article about the spread of infectious ideas through social networks.