Remember that lame science experiment you performed in grade school? You know, the baking soda and vinegar volcano? "C minus," intoned your teacher, shaking her head. Well, here's your shot at redemption. Scott Eric Kaufman at Acephalous is attempting to impress the Modern Language Association by quantifying an answer to that age-old (actually, fairly new) question: What is the speed of meme?
People write in general (typically truimphant) terms about how swiftly a single voice can travel from one side of the internet to the other and back again, but how often does that actually happen? Of those instances, how often is it organic?Most memes, I'd wager, are only superficially organic: beginning small, they acquire minor prominence among low-traffic blogs before being picked up by a high-traffic one, from which many more low-traffic blogs snatch them. Contra blog-triumphal models of memetic bootstrapping, I believe most memes are—to borrow a term from Daniel Dennett's rebuttal of punctuated equilibrium—"skyhooked" into prominence by high-traffic blogs.
Yeah, yeah, whatever. The important thing is that he needs about a jillion people to link to his post along with a brief description of his grand experiment. Oh, and be sure to ping Technorati manually, unless your blog's settings do so automagically or something. Go ahead, do it. You'll finally be able to put that grade school humiliation behind you once and for all.
(Cross-posted in the name of, you know, science and shit.)
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