The spread of memes in Twitter may have nothing much, if anything, to do with the meme itself. The results in this paper suggest that the dynamics of the network inevitably lead to emergent patterns of meme distribution. Pretty much anything can go viral and, more significantly, it can be completely random. In real life, this seems counter intuitive, inasmuch as there must be some relevance to the content: if one tweeted a random assortment of words, or a bland statement like ‘I like popcorn’ it is hard to believe that it would go viral as rapidly as, say, the announcement of a major natural disaster or the impeachment of a president. However, it could (and does) happen, with no further explanation needed apart from ‘it is random’. That’s quite interesting.
Address of the bookmark: http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/120329/srep00335/full/srep00335.html
