Man’s Not Hot
Unless you were living under a rock, you have probably heard of Big Shaq, and no, not the ‘quite big’ basketball player. Well, Michael Dapaah had as at-the-time-of-this-writing achieved more than 50 million views on his Man’s not hot video . Whereas the quality content of the video is up to subjective debate, his meteoritic rise has certainly resulted from the effects of information cascades. With a few catchy phrases, memes and a herd that started in the streets of London, his name was spread from person to person up until the herd mentality took on. For most teens, one simply needed to at least have heard of him.
Take for example the opening statement of this blog post; did it not give you the urge to find out what I was talking about? Just as with the information effect and cascading effect, the intermediate period of the growth of Big Shaq’s popularity was the question of “they know this, so should I”. This was further aided by the use of memes; I particularly got curious when I saw a meme “2+2 is 4, minus 1 that’s 3 quick maths”… of course followed by an uncommonly funny face. Then I saw another. Then another. Then I saw a sarcastic variation “2+2 is 4, minus 1 that’s free quick mafs”. Of course I had to google. Everyone seemed to know something that I did not. And it is this power of memes coupled with herd mentality that spread Shaq’s first video like bushfire. It did help when certain influential people, picked up his name and spread his popularity on the internet.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/viral-growth-case-study-michael-dapaah-alec-gehlot