The McFly Effect: Why Everything on Facebook Is Probably a Lie

A Facebook friend posted this image this morning.

Those of you in particular social media circles will feel a twinge of familiarity, as you probably saw something remarkably similar in the middle of last year, when the exact same image appeared, also doctored to the then current date. I, myself, am something of a BTTF aficionado, having watched the trilogy far too many times as a teen, and so when I saw the 2012 version, something struck me as a slightly off. I did a quick search on Snopes and found that I was right—the date had been altered.

Changing a seven-segment display is, like, Photoshop 101. No, it's Photoshop 97, the remedial class for people who totally missed the "how to turn on your computer" class in high school. There's no real reason to trust this image. But that's not how your brain works. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow identifies two parts of a mind: System 1, the instant-reaction, automatic computation part, and System 2, the slow-thinking solver of complex problems. The brain, he says, is a "machine for jumping to conclusions", where System 1 does most of the work, and enlists System 2 only when the going gets relatively rough. And System 1's default is to trust what it sees.

Unless System 2 is active, System 1 will take whatever it's given and run off. And our control over our own vigilance is spotty. Acts like self-control and vigilance require energy, and this energy can be spent over time, in a phenomenon known as "ego depletion". When mental energy is low, we're even more eager to believe everything we see and hear than usual. Facebook is a great ego sink, as people often use it to relax, procrastinate, or otherwise fill downtime. Facebook also offers people a litany of choices, and decision-making further depletes mental energy. So, you arrive at a place where most users have a means of sharing information, and show up at a time when they're most likely to believe it at face value. The perfect storm.

Because of the strange topography of social media content propagation, these ideas will bounce around the tubes like used swim diapers in a wave pool. And, the rule of 10,000 ensures there will always be someone there to pass it on.

The Need for a New Social Science

Memetics, Marketing, and Sociology can only get us so far.

I'm going to be very, very careful in this post; I don't know how to present this in a way that doesn't make me sound a little eccentric. I've been thinking a lot lately about memetics, the study of the transmission and propagation of ideas. These ideas have been compared alternately to genes and to biological viruses, spreading about hither and yon. There's been a bit of work done in the area of what ideas stick and what ideas don't, (consensus: various values are important, truth is only one of them) but there are just some huge, fat, gaping holes in the current state of the study of the propagation of ideas.

Gaping Hole #1: Knowing What We Can Know

First, and this is the scariest, we just have a very limited ability to view memes. We can see the spread of macro images on the internet, and identify that Ceiling Cat is probably sticking around for a while, whereas Rebecca Black's "Friday" is probably not. But we don't really know what to do with this information; the shape of the meme continues to elude us.

We will almost certainly never be able to predict what data will spread, and we will almost certainly never fully get a bead on what makes data "spreadable". We can get a general idea, perhaps, but it won't be an equation. Psychohistory is an idea in Asimov books, not a thing that will actually exist. (Oh, yeah, link. Sorry.)

This gaping hole is that memetic endeavors have largely been misguided because they've been strapped to a biological framework. Memes have no chromosomes, they cannot be put under a microscope, and they cannot be "sequenced".

Gaping Hole #2: Ideas and Behaviors

Second, there's not much in the literature by way of determining what, if any, is the difference between ideas that spread and the behaviors they leave behind. A piece of information that spreads might just annoy me by leaving "Never Gonna Give You Up" stuck in my head, or it might convince me to vote for Ralph Nader. There is a big difference between a meme and its behavioral payload.

Gaping Hole #3: The Myth of Measurement

Third, memetics tends toward the very abstract, and generally fails to measure anything at all, instead engaging in length thought experiments and exegeses on what theoretical construct is better for the task, in essence applying none of them empirically. Here's an article example, and it's ridiculously long.

The Solution

The solution is to actually conduct experiments on actual cultural transmission. Richard Dawkins, the founder of memetics, once noted that memetics had not yet found its Crick and Watson; it hadn't even found its Mendel. I think he was wrong. Plenty of people have come before, studying memetics before it was called memetics. Most importantly, to my mind, is the sociolinguist William Labov.

Labov tackled issues of how language change spread, what factors made someone likely to adapt their dialect to another, and so forth. One of his earliest and most famous studies was one of employees in three different department stores in New York City. He found that one meme, the tendency to "correct" the New York City tendency to "drop" the r-sound in certain words (his test was "fourth floor"). The meme was more likely to spread along socioeconomic lines, meaning that those in stores with higher-priced goods tended to include r-sounds in "fourth floor".

I know this isn't really much, as far as studies go, but it was a start. Labov discovered a number of patterns of linguistic change, and scores of sociolinguists after him have followed suit. Sociolinguistics may be a little tame compared to full-on memetics, as language traits are hardly as world-changing as religious and political beliefs, but it is a sufficient, if terribly overlooked start. Not much different from Mendel's plants, if you think about it.

That R-pentomino Is So Hot Right Now

Why virality might a real-life application of the least competitive game in the world.

Ars Technica's Casey Johnson wrote a stellar article about game theory being a more apt explanation of viral media than actual virology. The article points out that the epidemiological approach "is fitting for some cases, in others it's an oversimplification—a person's exposure to a trend doesn't always guarantee they will adopt it and pass it on." Essentially, this is the beginning of the explanation for why websites and gadgets succeed, while other, similarly featured ones fail.

The researchers from the AT article ran a couple of models based on game theory principles. The first assumed that likelihood that a new computer application would be adopted by any given person was directly proportional to the number of friends in said person's network that adopted, and that knowledge of friends' adoption or non-adoption was 100%. This doesn't explain much—it creates a world with an infinite barrier to entry, but a preternatural tendency to growth. The second model denied absolute knowledge of friends' choices, and added a "try-it-out" rule: 100% adoption for nodes that had 0% knowledge of friends' tastes.

This was starting to sound a little like Life. Not the cereal, nor the Zen police procedural, but the game. John Conway's Game of Life is a zero-player game. I seriously won't attempt to beat Wikipedia at explaining it (skim it now, then come back), but suffice it to say that outcomes are both: absolutely predictable by machines who know the rules and can compute them on the fly, and terribly unpredictable and surprising to those who don't know or can't, you know, do several hundred computations in a few milliseconds. Patterns that seem small and silly may spread for generations and generations, and intricate designs might collapse in just a few. (Play Life here.)

It's that unpredictable propagation that makes Life interesting. And while the rules of the game are surely different from the much more complex rules of social marketing, it stands to reason that a few things are similar: it's more important who knows about your product/website than how many of them there are to start off with. If people that people trust (read that phrase again) know about your content, so much the better. But if the social networks of your early adopters can serve to propagate your message to other widely-trusted individuals, sounds like you have a really solid start.

There are HUGE amounts of conjecture in this one little post. We of course have no clue what the rules to the idea-passing mechanism are, how to determine who the starters for your viral marketing plan are, or what "special sauce" makes an idea likely to be passed. Memetics has largely failed in this regard; future research is desperately needed here.

The Invormavore Diet

A Balanced Plan of Internet Consumption for the Mental Health-Conscious

Editor's Note: This is an old post from my previous blog. I'm on vacation this week, so this is what you're getting. Next week, probably something about "Comical Ali" or maybe Facebook.

I'm taking as a source this article from Edge regarding human behavior in the Information Age. In it, our information consumption is compared with food consumption, and later, the survival of ideas is related to the survival of species via natural selection. Combining these two ideas, we arrive at the concept that information must be consumed in order to propagate, making ideas not like animal meat, but like vegetable matter. Vegetables and fruits that grow quickly, yield a lot of nutritive value, and taste good are more likely than their competitors to thrive in the world of herbivores, as their seeds are more likely to be spread, and they are more likely to be cultivated. Unfortunately, the web is like a field of jellybean plants--magical, yes, but unfulfilling and likely to give you a stomachache.

We need to "eat" better content because it makes us feel better, and is good for our development.

It's very clear that when we surf the web, we use energy. In order to look, read, learn, link, tweet, embed, and digg, we make our little cells do something, which depletes our store in some way or another, and uses our time--eating information, like any other consumer activity, comes at a cost. Massive cognitive load can cause errors in our learning, and there are other, more nebulous results of our purposeful information overload. Particularly relevant is this man's experience, echoed by millions of users of the blogotubes, but there is also research that implicates the very nature of the web in dangerous behavior.

Of course, there are benefits from our newfound infobounty. One study shows that googling may make you smarter, in some ways. Less esoteric is the benefit of simply having access to people and information that otherwise were forever out of reach. We can be more informed voters, wiser parents, better employees and students, and generally more knowlegeable people.

Unfortunately, when given this phenomenal power, we use it to further our own inanity, as we have every other medium. In this there is no great harm--a little pointless timewasting never hurt anyone. But, whether it's its novelty or some heretofore unknown power inherent in information, the internet is as interesting, or more, than television. Thankfully, it is also more modular, with content in smaller pieces, and so more decision-making is involved in our consumption. We can choose to discern the crap from the useful information, or we can choose to consume without thought, eating information like we eat food--inverting the pyramid and indulging in candy while dabbling in wholesome content.

That being said, it's not wrong to eat candy. It's not wrong to haz your occasional cheezburger. All content--except some particularly repulsive stuff, which happens to inhabit a large percentage of the extant web--has its place, but if cartoons were more occasional, and important information were more frequent, progress' clip would increase.

It is essential to note that I will say nothing of what is or is not Important Content. That is for each of us to decide. It must be intentionally sought, even if the seeds of this interest were randomly sown.

We need to "eat" better content because it spurs the creation of more quality content.

Further, in this world of meta-searching, self-analyzing, and ad-targeting, the viewer is, in fact king. It would be wise not to underestimate one's power in this world, as the link, the digg, the tweet, etc, are ways to propagate approval quickly and efficiently. The internet has built itself a very efficient feedback system.

Spread links to interesting information. Post interesting content. Eat right, and the whole world will be a better place.

Quantum Soft Science

As our world becomes one with technology, it has also become one with the people running it. Contrary to what we all read in old sci-fi, the Computer Age has been more person-centric than machine-centric. And as our actions affect everyone more and more acutely, humanity has become something of a last frontier for scientific inquiry. Certainly that’s not to say that we understand all the “hard” sciences perfectly, but the “soft” sciences appear to have matured in our connected society.

A large part of the pop-soft-sci phenomenon leads back to economics. A journalist and an economist teamed up to write “Freakonomics” in 2005, which is a perfect example of the Quantum Soft Science trend. They take one ostensibly intractable problem (e.g. urban crime rates declining, for example), and explain it with an apparently left-field solution (abortion rates increasing). But, of course, the trend doesn’t end with economy.

Of course, sociology is a natural outlet for this kind of work. General interest magazines like Slate run sociologically-oriented articles all the time (see “How Black People Use Twitter”). Even the historical aspect of this field is analyzed—see Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel”.

The new psychology tells us about why wine taste is more related to cost than composition, and why marshmallow consumption can predict educational and vocational choices. And of course, there is the new linguistics, the new literary theory, and the new history.

All of these odd-fact-producing fields are driving toward one nigh-impossible goal: the prediction of human behavior. And one can see why that would be interesting. The unpredictability of humanity makes for some heavy socioeconomic turbulence, and limiting that unpredictability could have incredibly advantageous (or at least lucrative) effects.

The Electronic Middleman

Writing about social technology is something of an exercise in redundancy. Essentially every technology writer in existence has taken a turn discussing the relevance and effects of social media on social networks, culture, and individual psychology. As this post is simply an introduction to the topic, here are a few of the arguments and questions that will be plumbed in later posts.

The biggest and most easily accepted argument in any discussion on social media is that it fundamentally changes the nature of human communication and sociology. But how?

An important question here involves the size of a social network. Previously, it was taken as gospel that the human neocortex limits the size of a viable social network to somewhere around 150 people. This doesn’t appear to correspond, however, to real occurrences on social networking sites. While the average Facebook user only has 130 friends, violations of Dunbar’s number on very high orders are very easily found.

And there’s another thing: a new type of prestige appears to be forming around the friend / follower number. In fact, there’s an equation that determines your Twitter clout.

Social media tend to the making of all comment into public comment. As such, new social norms are emerging regarding tact and honesty in these spontaneous forums. Further, such forums fragment the national or world discussion of certain topics into various, generally unrepresentative sample discussions.

Social media and other communication technologies allow for an increasingly developed middle ground between synchronous and asynchronous communication. This changes the nature of conversation by messing with the time between discourse turns, allowing for more or less thought between statements than previously

This fuzzy synchronicity can lead to the loss of conversational fluidity. That change in fluidity can have a whole range of effects on discourse pragmatics in general.

Previously, human communication was either very high priority (face-to-face or telephonic) or very low (correspondence). Now, there are medium settings to that priority, allowing for reasonably important communication to be done while performing other tasks.

Further, more than one conversation can be happening at the same time, and over multiple media. That simultaneity can lead to an increase in conversational density—and we may not be able to predict what that means for the brain.

For certain, some of the effects of social media, and the internet in general, are perceived under an umbrella category of “loss of focus”. But, is that loss of focus real? And is it such a bad thing?

Social media certainly affects the importance of distance in maintaining a social network. Friends can be kept, on some level, despite vast physical distances. But, what is the importance of “meatspace”, and what role will physical closeness play in the future of social networks?