Measuring The Speed of Meme: An Experiment in which You Will Participate, Or Else...

[Short Version: Link to this post in the name of science.  Ask others to do the same.  Results to be announced during the "Meet the Bloggers" panel at MLA 2006.]

[Update #6: I want everyone to say hello to all the nice mefi folk stopping by this morning.  They are more than welcome to slam me here too, but before doing so they may want to check out Scott McLemee's second post about this little experiment on Crooked Timber.  I anticipated failure, not success, so the claim that I'm link-whoring misses the mark as much as the Wired article did.]

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.

For my talk at the MLA, I'd prefer being able to quantify this triumphalism with hard numbers.  Had I paid attention when "DISADVENTURE" and "My Morning" made the rounds, I could've completed this little experiment without revealing its existence.  Since I lack foresight, I'm stuck announcing my intentions and begging participation.  Here's what I need you to do:

1. Write a post linking to this one in which you explain the experiment.  (All blogs count, be they TypePad, Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, &c.)
2. Ask your readers to do the same.  Beg them.  Relate sob stories about poor graduate students in desperate circumstances.  Imply I'm one of them.  (Do whatever you have to.  If that fails, try whatever it takes.)
3. Ping Technorati.

While you do that, a script I've written will track this meme (via Technorati) across the internet in 10 minute intervals.  It will record the number of links to this post, register their authority and create a database the very size of which will cause my poor processor to fall tumbling, in flames, down a steep cliff.  (So be it.  We all must makes sacrifices in the name of science.)

My fear is that I'll post this and no one will participate in my experiment.  On the one hand, that'll be educational too, allowing me to talk about top-down vs. bottom-up dynamics, the ineffectiveness of compulsion and coercion on free-range bloggers, &c.  On the other, I would rather not tell the august body of the Modern Language Association that bloggers only stop posting about what they had for lunch (fish sticks!) when their cat strikes another (fifth today!) outrageously adorable pose...

[Update #1: This post?  Not a chain letter.  This one is—sort of.]

[Update #2: An update.]

[Update #3: N. Pepperell provides an excellent account of "the methodology slam," as witnessed in the comments below and around the web.]

[Update #4: Yes, convention dictates updates be tacked to the bottom of posts.  The Management is aware of this breach in protocol and will punish the party responsible for it.]

[Update #5: As you can see, we've taken care of #4.  Are we awesome or what? — The Management.]

Comments

[Monk]

Oh who the hell are we kidding...we all want to be part of something.

[orcmid]

Hi Scott, thanks for your comment. A couple of things: I can't find a link to the MLA panel in this article. I find links to other posts of yours but not to anything at the MLA site or an MLA 2006 site (although that seems to be closed to non-MLA members). I also couldn't find any explanation of "MLA" but Modern Language Association has Google preference for the term. And finally, just what exactly is the meme of which you speak and are attempting to measure of its propogation? I'm baffled.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

No problem. The link above goes to the same text as is printed in the MLA program. I don't think you can see the official program without belonging to the MLA (and yes, that's the Modern Language Association), but I assure you, I'm not lying. (Or if I am, my co-panelists will be very disappointed and likely violent.)

As for the meme itself, I intended for it to have a latent content with a very limited interest: "if you find presentations at the MLA interesting and have a blog, pass it on." In the end, I think what began as a nearly content-free meme became something resembling an actual one, with people adapting my original post as it suited their own interests, but that's beside the my point.

Also turns out I underestimated my own reach and learned a fine lesson in the true meaning of the word "exponential." I also established, via posts like yours, the soundness of my original idea:

Scott Eric Kaufman's "The New Interdisciplinary" contends that the blogosphere offers new possibilities for both inter- and intradisciplinary work. Drawing from his own experience, Kaufman demonstrates how a blog chronicling an English graduate student's dissertation on evolutionary theory in fin de siecle American literature can be read and commented upon by historians, philosophers, historians and philosophers of science, evolutionary biologists, and sociologists. Such feedback encourages the growth and development of projects with a sound interdisciplinary foundation and functions as a check on the long-standing and oft-voiced concerns about interdisciplinary work.

N. Pepperell just coined a snazzier name for it: "the methodology slam." Well, the slam part's not explicit there, but I've been slammed often enough to recognize one even when it's being done politely.

Finally, I understand why people didn't like the Dennett reference, but Dennett is critiquing the punctuatedness of punctuated equilibrium in his discussion of cranes and skyhooks -- Gould sees leaps, Dennett shows how, with the proper perspective, they're actually baby-steps. No skyhooks, only cranes. (The other problem is that Dennett defines "skyhooks" both as things in the sky upon which stuff is hung and deus ex machina. I obviously meant the latter, not the former (and I don't think Dennett did, either, he was just sloppy in a couple of interviews). According to my notes -- not always to be trusted, I'm taking this from page 76 or thereabouts.

[augustine]

Anyone see the new movie, THE GENIUS CLUB?

http://www.southernvanity.com/reelOpinion.htm

[dan]

I will link to this.

[Kathi]

My link explains how someone doing a Technorati search for "Soldiers Angels", who then came across a link to a Charity Tag Meme from an IT guy,can somehow then end up here,LOL.

[Rogers]

Hi, maybe i'm the first member from indonesia and just wanna to say hi to all.

[Rock]

Oh who the hell are we kidding...we all want to be part of something.

hehehe : )

[Conversational Hypnosis]

[…] Dmitriy wrote an interesting post today on Conversational Hypnosis. Here’s a quick excerpt.. It is a form of covert hypnosis that hypnotizes people without them knowing it. It's a combination of methods (more about Conversational Hypnosis…) […] [url=http://www.ctecomputer.com/_branch/0000331a.htm]Conversational Hypnosis[/url]

[read]

i like that all the trackbacks like call me read more, read more
i didn't click on any of them though, later in the evening perhaps