

Average Is Boring: How Similarity Kills a Meme's Success - mikk14
http://www.nature.com/srep/2014/140926/srep06477/full/srep06477.html

======
bitwize
I was expecting this to be an article about why "I Don't Always X, But When I
Do I Y" type image macros have a short shelf-life before we tire of them.

The internet and its attendant peculiar uaage of terms has killed my brain.

~~~
sliverstorm
Killed your brain? Nah. This _was_ about those types of image macros, though
it was more about their relative shelf-lives compared to eachother than short
life in general. The supplemental materials are informative:

[http://www.nature.com/srep/2014/140926/srep06477/extref/srep...](http://www.nature.com/srep/2014/140926/srep06477/extref/srep06477-s1.pdf)

~~~
mikk14
Exactly (I am the paper's author). While it is dangerous to identify the
scientific term "meme" with those image macros, to study them has a lot of
advantages. For example, it is very easy to quantify how popular they are,
where and when they get their popularity spikes and so on. I am working on
follow-up research enlarging a bit my narrow set of memes, to get it closer to
the actual scientific term.

~~~
weeksie
Ooh! Nice. I've been doing a bit of reading on meme theory lately and it's
definitely caught my imagination. Still, I'm pretty skeptical.

I think my general problem with memetics is that it's so hard to quantify a
meme. Using image macro jokes is definitely a good way to get something that's
easy to measure—but does that simplification go too far? Is it too artificial?
What makes an image macro joke "atomic"? Sorry if you've answered this in the
paper, but I started skimming when I realized that you were talking about
image macro jokes.

As far as I know the criticism of meme theory is that the mutation rate is too
high for the sort of stable evolution that we see in biological life. I don't
doubt that natural selection is at work, but the more I read about meme
theory, the more I think that looking at linguistic units as gene-like is a
poor abstraction—precisely because of the difficulty in measurement.

I'm not sure how to phrase the questions I have since I am a complete layman
in regards to evolutionary biology, linguistics, and meme theory. But any high
level overview of your rationale and pointers to further reading would be
awesome.

~~~
mikk14
Using a biological metaphor to study memes is actually an ongoing debate. This
strategy has been questioned by some researchers [1], while others (me
included) found that it fits the observation quite nicely [2]. I haven't much
more to say than "We just need more research". Sorry if it is not very
enlightening :-)

My rationale for this paper comes from the fact that the usage image macro
templates is pretty stable, as observed with two years worth of data. I have
previous work [3] where I use image macro memes and I show evidences of
competition, collaboration, clustering tendencies (which could be interpreted
as the creation of proto-organisms, more research needed). On top of those
observations, I find that these image macros satisfy at least the weakest
requirements to be considered a proper subject to be studied.

Bear in mind the difference between what I call a "meme implementation" (the
image with superimposed text, like in
[http://i.imgur.com/j9CTxt8.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/j9CTxt8.jpg)) with the
"meme template" (in this case the collection of all Socially Awkward
Penguins). The latter is the one that's relatively stable, the former is very
dynamic. In a paper I just submitted I analyze meme usage in Reddit's post
titles and I observe just that. So that's definitely going too low.

[1] E.g. Weng, L., Flammini, A., Vespignani, A. & Menczer, F. Competition
among memes in a world with limited attention. Scientific reports 2, 335;
doi:10.1038/srep00335 (2013)

[2] E.g. Adamic, L., Lento, T., Adar, E. & Ng, P. Information evolution in
social networks.
[http://www.ladamic.com/papers/infoevolution/MemeEvolutionFac...](http://www.ladamic.com/papers/infoevolution/MemeEvolutionFacebook.pdf)

[3] Michele Coscia: Competition and Success in the Meme Pool: A Case Study on
Quickmeme.com. ICWSM 2013

------
barnabask
The irony of a scientific paper dissecting the popularity of "Socially Awkward
Penguin" is thick.

