The Disease Model

That's what they call it -- Susceptible, Infected, Recovered. Disease transmission follows a fairly predictable pattern, just ask the covid epidemiologists.

Totally unrelated image credit: Marco Zoppo - Christ as the Man of Sorrows - 1470

It's about the way things spread within a network; nodes and links. Throw some complexity science in there, and you can model a pretty good simulation of waves of infection, where they spread, how fast. 

But it's not just diseases, which are spread by physical particles floating through the air. Behaviors follow the disease model too, and ideas, and preferences and tastes. They're spreading through people, just like diseases.

That's getting into the science of memetics though. For now, let's keep it more simple than that -- think about how you started using social media, what was your first account and who got you into it, what social networks were you a part of then?

You were being infected.

Honestly I won't even repaste any of this paper, because it does come from the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department, which seems weird for a paper about disease modeling. But it is from Princeton, and that department does cover some pretty crazy stuff, and some of it is partially related. It concluded that Facebook is going through humans like a wave of the Delta variant, but at the same time, losing the people who recover from the disease. They said there won't be anyone left by 2018, because everyone's either still infected, or been recovered. (Luckily for Facebook, bots are infinite!)

And would you look at that, here's Facebook being called out for misleading investors by blending their actual user numbers with those of their Single Users with Multiple Accounts, i.e., among other things, the botnet.

But long before this information was divulged under congressional testimony circa 2021, this paper, from 2014, and generated from even earlier discussions at a 2012 research symposium, predicted this already -- they followed the disease model on a social network. It makes you wonder why there weren't other studies like it:

Epidemiological modeling of online social network dynamics, John Cannarell, Joshua A. Spechler. Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University. arxiv:1401.4208v1 [cs.SI] 17 Jan 2014. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.4208v1.pdf

 

Think about the last few songs you downloaded (do people still?). Where did you hear them, from who?

They infected you.

Music download patterns found to resemble infectious disease epidemic curves

Sep 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-09-music-download-patterns-resemble-infectious.html

"The researchers found that downloads from the site very much matched patterns of diseases spreading. With infectious diseases, one-to-one contact is needed. With songs...hundreds of people might respond by downloading it." -link

"We draw conclusions about song popularity within specific genres based on estimated SIR parameters. In particular, we argue that faster spread of preferences for Electronica songs may reflect stronger connectivity of the ‘susceptible community’, compared with the larger and broader community that listens to more common genres." -link

via McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind in Canada: Dora P. Rosati et al, Modelling song popularity asacontagious process, Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1098/rspa.2021.0457

Even ideas can be infectious. They're reproducing in our minds, after all. Memetically transmitted diseases, following the S-I-R model. Dairying was an idea that changed the genome of a lot of humans. And olfactory receptors make up the biggest family of your genome, like 2%, and they're changing all the time, and sometimes because of cultural reasons, like bacon. 

Probably the greatest example of an idea being infectious is the idea against vaccinations, because technically, under the memetic paradigm, the virus, any virus whether measles, covid, or syphilis, is figuring out how to fight the scientific advancement of vaccinations by infecting our minds with antivax thoughts -- they're evolving in more ways than one! (See below for more on this, but be careful, you may want to inoculate your brain first.)

Post Post:

If you're into this topic, prepare to go deep, very deep:

Adaptive Metamemetics, Infectious Disease Networks, and Ludwig Fleck's Thought Collectives

March 2020, Network Address

https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2020/03/adaptive-metamemetics-infectious.html

I had no idea how prescient this would be when I wrote it, but studying Ludwig Fleck prior to a global vaccination campaign wasn't a bad idea.

Post Post Script:

They don't say it but I will, claim of memetic supremacy right here:

[I call it Memetic Supremacy] Parity and time reversal elucidate both decision-making in empirical models and attractor scaling in critical Boolean networks. via Pennsylvania State University, Broad Institute, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Semmelweis University, and Center for Complex Network Research. Science Advances (2021). https://advances.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf8124

 

Measles is the Winner by TKO

Measles is so powerful that after we defeated it with vaccines, it came back even stronger to infect our minds!

We might think of vaccines as a meta-defense, a meta-immune system, which could also be called Public Health or even just modern medicine. Measles has found a way to penetrate this defense.

The anti-vax meme is, perhaps, the first example of a disease making the transition from the biosphere to the noosphere, so that we now, in order to fight measles, we need to inoculate our minds in addition to our bodies. (A mental vaccine, that is.)

Via Dawkins' Selfish Gene, we don't get measles, measles gets us. And in 2018-2019, it's doing a damn good job.

Here's a few newsbits on the subject:

Antivaxxers turn to homeschooling to avoid protecting their kids’ health
July 2019, Ars Technica

Analyzing a Facebook-fueled anti-vaccination attack - 'It's not all about autism'
Mar 2019, phys.org

An analysis of Facebook profiles for people who posted anti-vaccination sentiments reveals four key subgroups that are interconnected by various themes. Credit: Elsevier

...anti-vaccination arguments are not "all about autism" and center on four distinct themes that can appeal to diverse audiences in four distinct subgroups:

• "trust," which emphasized suspicion of the scientific community and concerns about personal liberty;
• "alternatives," which focused on chemicals in vaccines and the use of homeopathic remedies instead of vaccination;
• "safety," which focused on perceived risks and concerns about vaccination being immoral; and
• "conspiracy," which suggested that the government and other entities hide information that this subgroup believes to be facts, including that the polio virus does not exist.

Beth L. Hoffman et al, It's not all about autism: The emerging landscape of anti-vaccination sentiment on Facebook, Vaccine (2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2019.03.003


Facebook Takes Steps to Curb Sensational Health Claims
Molly Schuetz, Bloomberg, July 2, 2019

Deprioritizing sensationalist health posts that make misleading claims or tout “miracle cures,” and posts that use health-related claims to promote products or services, such as weight-loss pills.

On Deceptive Language:
April Fools hoax stories could offer clues to help identify 'fake news'
Mar 2019, phys.org

"April Fools hoaxes are very useful because they provide us with a verifiable body of deceptive texts that give us an opportunity to find out about the linguistic techniques used when an author writes something fictitious disguised as a factual account," said Edward Dearden from Lancaster University, and lead-author of the research. "By looking at the language used in April Fools and comparing them with fake news stories we can get a better picture of the kinds of language used by authors of disinformation."

The researchers found that April fools hoax stories, when compared to genuine news:

• Are generally shorter in length
• Use more unique words
• Use longer sentences
• Are easier to read
• Refer to vague events in the future
• Contain more references to the present
• Are less interested in past events
• Contain fewer proper nouns
• Use more first person pronouns

Fake news stories, when compared to genuine news:

• Are shorter in length
• Are easier to read
• Use simplistic language
• Contain fewer punctuation marks
• Contain more proper nouns
• Are generally less formal—use more first names such as 'Hillary' and contain more profanity and spelling mistakes
• Contain very few dates
• Use more first person pronouns

Post Script
Study busts myths about gossip
May 2019, phys.org

"There is a surprising dearth of information about who gossips and how, given public interest and opinion on the subject," said Megan Robbins, an assistant psychology professor who led the study along with Alexander Karan, a graduate student in her lab.

If you're going to look at gossip like an academic, remove the value judgment we assign to the word. Gossip, in the academic's view, is not bad. It's simply talking about someone who isn't present. That talk could be positive, neutral, or negative.

"With that definition, it would be hard to think of a person who never gossips because that would mean the only time they mention someone is in their presence," Robbins said. "They could never talk about a celebrity unless the celebrity was present for the conversation; they would only mention any detail about anyone else if they are present."

• Younger people engage in more negative gossip than older adults. There was no correlation with overall frequency of gossip when all three categories were combined.
• About 14 percent of participants' conversations were gossip, or just under an hour in 16 waking hours
• Almost three-fourths of gossip was neutral. Negative gossip (604 instances) was twice as prevalent as positive (376)
• Gossip overwhelmingly was about an acquaintance and not a celebrity, with a comparison of 3,292 samples vs. 369
• Extraverts gossip far more frequently than introverts, across all three types of gossip
• Women gossip more than men, but only in neutral, information-sharing, gossip
• Poorer, less education people don't gossip more than wealthier, better-educated people.