Information Cascades and Going “Viral” on the Internet
In a recent article from Time, author Derek Thompson discusses both the intuition and some of the data behind viral media in the 21st century. The article, titled “Why It’s a Lot Harder to ‘Go Viral’ on the Internet Than You Think,” provides an interesting analysis of the factors that go into a post going “viral.” Thompson first goes into the misleading use of “viral” within this context; he argues that unlike a disease which follows a relatively stable exponential trend, viral internet content will often remain stagnant until a few key shares lead to a cascade of subsequent shares. He provides multiple examples where the original post is shared very few times until a celebrity or an account with many followers shares the post. In this way, the original post remains with very few shares, but the celebrity’s post goes viral and by association the original post.
While the article does not delve deeply into the science behind this phenomenon, the topic is quite clearly related to information cascades in networks. As one might trivially expect, the pace at which information spreads does increase as time goes on; however, the idea that individuals in the network can greatly accelerate the cascade is much more nuanced. Using the article’s example, we can see that a celebrity or popular account has more power, simply by the number of connections (edges) it has to other users (nodes). This increased power translates to a higher influence and even the ability to cause an information cascade. We can apply this to both the restaurant review and marbles and urns examples from class. In the former, one might consider the case of two restaurants, one with a good review but very few people and another with no review and nearly full. We saw in class that a given person may choose to go to either restaurant. Now, suppose that you see a famous chef eating at the restaurant without a review; I would argue that even though only one more person is at the busy restaurant than before, you are much more likely to eat there because they are a powerful member of the network. The same point can be made in the marble experiment. The announcement made by the first people to draw is much more influential than those later. One reason for this is that their decision influences all the following decisions, and thus they play a more important role in the experiment like the celebrities described in the article.
Article URL: http://time.com/4672540/go-viral-on-internet/