Understanding Memes as Information Epidemcis

So, I’ll give you a few seconds to name what this image represents.

Give up?

It’s the visualization of the diffusion of #Egypt meme during the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, courtesy of a recent study published by Indiana University which analyzes how competition for attention determines what does and doesn’t go viral.

The academic world has been using this literal interpretation of “viral” to study Internet memes for a while now. What’s different about this study is it utilizes data captured during the study to interpret how our attention to certain issues impacts the epidemic nature of a specific subject matter when it infiltrates social media ecosystems.

In the summary, republished by Physics.org from an article appearing in the March 29^th issue of Scientific Reports, the study team “developed a meme diffusion model with agents (users) that maintained time-ordered posts, each about a specific meme. Neighbors received new memes, a memory mechanism allowed agents to develop interests and focus, and limited attention was included by allowing posts to survive on agents' lists for a finite time period.” By controlling the amount of time the post lived introduced a new dimension into the study—time—and thusly the human being’s attention span for bits of information.

Normally, I find the intersection of social media and academia and the STUDY of the former to be an exercise in the “no duh.” However, utilizing the epidemic model of information distribution is fascinating, particularly in understanding WHY certain topics become popular and which issues do not. For example, if you look at the diagram above, what you see is that the network itself is centralized and dense in the middle, implying, of course, that it was geographically influenced, which surely also impacted the nature of the group's attention to the specific meme.

The father of this kind of thought could considerably be Malcom Gladwell, but this is a departure from his thought that it is the influencer of epidemics that causes them to spread without considering the data used by the researchers of the study. This may not seem relevant to social media marketers, but it should. And as more and more infections memes cause veritable revolutions to spark around the world, it likely will.

A recent example of a meme of epidemic proportions was the YouTube documentary about Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. Let’s hope this meme—which seemed to capture everyone’s attention above and beyond all else (during an election year no less)—would be an ideal candidate for this type of modeling. What would that picture look like? How far did it spread across the United States and the world and how did time and attention impact the spread of a meme? Certainly food for thought; if you really want to dig into the study, including all of the science used in the modeling, it’s published in its entirety here.