Friday 9 December 2011

Facebook persists with their "memology" nonsense

I told Facebook this time last year that the study of memes is not called "memology".

Yet still they persist with their nonsense. Oh well. Their video is above. Their "memology" page is here.

An engineer claims that things like the death of Steve Jobs, Amy Winehouse and Gadaffi are not down to a "viral effect" - whereas status updates such as "like my status" are - because the deaths are current affairs events that people just happen to be simultaneously talking about. That seems to be a confused perspective, it seems to me. Both spread in a similar "epidemiological" manner. It would be reasonable to classify meme "virality" according to whether the content was deleterious to its host or not - but surely not like this.

No comments:

Post a Comment