Feynman's Advice to a Young Stephen Wolfram

Particularly interesting if you are intrigued by the origin and transmission of ideas.   As I am.  This blog for example was established to continue communications to our innovation center visitors over the years.   It has morphed to a more technical emergent technology alerting method.  And when it can it connects with rising memes, and aims to create value from them.

Richard Feynman’s Advice to a Young Stephen Wolfram (1985)
Jørgen Veisdal  in Medium.  .... 

Memes, Protomemes and Popularity

Quite interesting, technical, detailed experimentation with data and unclear possible applications. How advertising and results are influenced

Popularity Spikes Hurt Future Chances for Viral Propagation of Protomemes  By Michele Coscia

Communications of the ACM, Vol. 61 No. 1, Pages 70-77

A meme is a concept introduced by Dawkins12 as an equivalent in cultural studies of a gene in biology. A meme is a cultural unit, perhaps a joke, musical tune, or behavior, that can replicate in people's minds, spreading from person to person. During the replication process, memes can mutate and compete with each other for attention, because people's consciousness has finite capacity. Meme viral spreading causes behavioral change, for the better, as when, say, the "ALS Bucket Challenge" meme caused a cascade of humanitarian donations,a and for the worse, as when researchers proved obesity7 and smoking8 are socially transmittable diseases. A better theory of meme spreading could help prevent an outbreak of bad behaviors and favor positive ones. .... " 

" ... Conclusion ..... We have tested some of the predictions of a theory that claims that meme success eschews similarity, because similar memes interfere with one another and get less attention.11 We tested the theory on Reddit and Hacker News, two popular social-bookmarking websites. Successful posts can hit each site's highly visible front page and then be copied many times over by people who want to use them to be able to get their own posts to appear on the front page. The expected popularity of these posts should thus decrease. We showed that this is the case, though on Reddit some posts might still experience subsequent popularity spikes; Hacker News appears to be resilient to this phenomenon. We explain this apparent contradiction by showing these posts (with persistent popularity spikes on Reddit) have low canonicity; that is, they are usually dissimilar from the average post containing their protomeme. We showed that canonicity has a nonlinear effect. .... " 

Text Mining Memes Online

Interesting progress in text mining that includes repeated memes and context.   Technical.

A system for extracting and comparing memes in online forums

Héctor Beck-Fernandeza, , David F. Nettletonb, , , Lorena Recaldeb, , Diego Saez-Trumperb, , Alexis Barahona-Peñarandaa, 

Highlights

Automatic extraction of top memes (key concepts, relations) from unstructured text.
Sophisticated meme construction and matching algorithm.
System with default/customizable control parameter set.
No preprocessing of text or manual intervention between steps is necessary.
Results show a better information retrieval F-score than other methods.

Abstract
From their origins in the sociological field, memes have recently become of interest in the context of `viral' transmission of basic information units (memes) in online social networks. However, much work still needs to be done in terms of metrics and practical data processing issues. In this paper we define a theoretical basis and processing system for extracting and matching memes from free format text. The system facilitates the work of a text analyst in extracting this type of data structures from online text corpuses and n performing empirical experiments in a controlled manner. The general aspects related to the solution are the automatic processing of unstructured text without need for preprocessing (such as labelling and tagging), identification of co-occurences of concepts and corresponding relations, construction of semantic networks and selecting the top memes.  .... "  

Sketches Selling Soap

A new Dove video called 'Sketches' now gone viral, seems to show how women's beauty view of themselves differs considerably from the view of others.  It is very entertaining, and seems to make a deep point.  I am not sure it really does that, given the unusual context that is constructed, using an FBI sketch artist.  Also a small sudy, with results selected for drama.    And secondly, the question that is asked of every clever ad: 'Does it sell soap?"   Dove soap?   A mini study described seems to say it does. But I doubt the influence is very deep.

The Alleged Spontaneity of Viral and Tremor

My former colleague Kevin Ashton writes about the 'Harlem Shake', which I admit I just noticed a few weeks ago.  My connectedness is more about the technical than the social.  He suggests that the swift movement of the meme was more about what corporations wanted to spread than the spontaneous eruptions of the  'hive mind'.  He tracks the emergence of the idea in early February, and how it was promoted by the press.  With lots of video examples.   Chicken and egg here.  It is scary, though that commercial interests may be able to build the wave to their purposes.   Or inevitable.  Reminds me of Tremor, which I had just heard has been abandoned by its corporate sponsors.  Or has it?  More about Tremor written here.