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Information Cascade in Meme Culture

Every day we make numerous decisions that are highly influenced by others. Although we may not realize, these decisions are often influenced by those of others to the extent that we ignore our own opinion and follow the “herd” of society. The theoretical literature on “herding” pertains to situations where people with private, incomplete information make public decisions in sequence. Hence, the first few decision makers reveal their information, and subsequent decision makers may follow an established pattern even when their private information suggests that they should deviate. This kind of informational cascade occurs when it is optimal for an individual without regard to his/her own information.

In many social and economic situations, individuals are influenced by the decisions of others. The commonest examples occur in everyday life, as in choosing a fashionable restaurant or a popular movie. Information cascades is an important feature of any networks as shown in our course structure. At first glance, it may seem that it is not possible to predict cascades of information. In a study conducted at Rutgers University, researchers studied the flow of information on Twitter during an emergency. Tracking the number of retweets following an emergency broadcast, they were able to plot a graph of tweets after the broadcast. The culture of memes may also appear to be products of the whims of social media, but in reality, there are a number of factors which decide the cascades of information. Memes have evolved, as the birth of the internet has grown simple memes into a culture in of themselves. Memes are abstract, intangible and unmeasurable. Memes are seldom copied exactly; their boundaries are always fuzzy, and they mutate with a wild flexibility that would be fatal in biology. The term “meme” could be applied to a suspicious cornucopia of entities, from small to large. As the arc of information flow bends toward ever greater connectivity, memes evolve faster and spread farther. Their presence is felt if not seen in herd behavior, bank runs, informational cascades and financial bubbles.

The herd behavior especially describes the meme culture because when if seeing this in a smaller setting like the Cornell meme community, when a single meme regarding the McGraw Clocktower being called ‘Bingalee Dingalee’ was uploaded, the Make Cornell Meme again group exploded with tons of variations of meme with Bingalee Dingalee as its main approach. Overnight the meme spread out across campus with everyone uploading new memes with not much idea as to how or why it started rather joined in on making newer variations and try to outmeme each other, which in turn serves as the direct benefit through information cascade in meme culture.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/what-defines-a-meme-1904778/
https://wmpeople.wm.edu/asset/index/lrande/cascadehandbook
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2138632?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
http://eml.berkeley.edu//~kariv/CK_II.pdf

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