Mountains Out of Molehills: Patterns in the Group Mind

Information Is Beautiful graphed out a timeline of global media scare stories in Mountains Out of Molehills, and fleshed out other comparisons of issue attention in Patterns in the Group Mind -- here 'violent video games' are pondered regularly near Christmas and the Columbine anniversary.

[update: Apparently Y2K, SARS, Violent video games, bird flu, vaccines and swine flu have dwarfed other search terms -- but the comparison doesn't use "September 11" or other popular terms, so it's a McChart.]

Related AEP posts include Meme tracking and the News Cycle and The "Issue-Attention Cycle".

Michael Jackson: So 10 days ago.

Michael Jackson, the self-anointed king of pop, was one of the biggest things on the Web. Peter Kafka on All Things Digital now notes that in Web Video Viewers Forget About Michael Jackson, at least the YouTube ones.

Kafka used the video views tracker on TubeMogul illustrate his argument. TubeMogul's analytics package brings statistics to both publishers and gawkers on 15 top video sharing sites; some services are free for non-commercial users.

Others like Silicon Alley Insider pronounced the Jackson meme dead on July 3. Jackson didn't even show up in the top 50 of Google Hot Trends of July 17. Here's Google's average worldwide traffic of "michael jackson" in the last 30 days:

Of course the major networks milked the story until fatigue set in, which spawned comments like This Just In: Michael Jackson, Still Dead. But another observed that Jackson’s demise allowed us "to interact with other people; to turn the news, to use the current jargon, into a ‘social object’." It's unfortunate for 800-1000 million who are slowly dying of hunger that they are social problem not a ‘social object’!

For a related perspective see the recent AEP post Meme tracking and the News Cycle.

Update: for a more serious look at the phenomena see The Man in the Mirror by Chris Hedges on Truthdig.

Meme tracking and the News Cycle

A new Cornell study, Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle, is discussed by the New York Times in Study Measures the Chatter of the News Cycle. This study is interesting on a few levels, since the Cornell project tracks "the quotes and phrases that appear most frequently over time across this entire online news spectrum. This makes it possible to see how different stories compete for news and blog coverage each day, and how certain stories persist while others fade quickly."

But so far the effort seems to be targeted to prove that blogs lag slightly behind mainstream media and other details which can safely be concluded from casual looks at Google Hot Trends, and aggregators like Techmeme, PopURLs, and Original Signal. Social problems and political hot potatoes are safely avoided, as are steps toward improved decision-making. For a neglected perspective, see the recent AEP post on Anthony Downs' "Issue-Attention Cycle."

The problem with news is that celebrity, impulse twit-ches, and emotion rules -- "if it bleeds, it leads" still applies. News mostly feeds us lurid filler. Recognized on a basic level since at least the time of Edward Bernays is that advertising and politics are propaganda. This can be seen in behavioral targeting, web tracking, and the careers of people like consultant Frank Luntz. For some background on "framing" for the social mind, see Douglas Rushkoff's PBS docs Merchants of Cool and The Persuaders. Right now the pitchman has a foot in the door, but there's more coming, like "social-networking TV," an electronic panopticon where you can "participate in your own manipulation," as EBN mused.

Still the Cornell study is worth a look, and we can expect more visualizations because you can download MemeTracker data. There's also a beginning of a discussion by Zachary M. Seward of the Neiman Journalism Lab, Chris Anderson, and Scott Rosenberg.

Here's an excerpt of the NYT article:

'The paper, “Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle,” was also written by Jure Leskovec, a postgraduate researcher at Cornell, who this summer will become an assistant professor at Stanford, and Lars Backstrom, a Ph.D. student at Cornell, who is going to work for Facebook. The team has set up interactive displays of their findings at memetracker.org.
Social scientists and media analysts have long examined news cycles, though focusing mainly on case studies instead of working with large Web data sets. And computer scientists have developed tools for clustering and tracking articles and blog posts, typically by subject or political leaning.

But the Cornell research, experts say, goes further in trying to track the phenomenon of news ideas rising and falling. “This is a landmark piece of work on the flow of news through the world,” said Eric Horvitz, a researcher at Microsoft and president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. “And the study shows how Web-scale analytics can serve as powerful sociological laboratories.”

Sreenath Sreenivasan, a professor specializing in new media at the Columbia Journalism School, said the research was an ambitious effort to measure a social phenomenon that is not easily quantified. “To the extent this kind of approach could open the door to a new understanding of the news cycle, that is very interesting,” he said.'

There there. I hear he only shoots JPEG.

"There, there. I hear he only shoots JPEG" says a minion in response to Hitler's rant about the Nikon D3x in a new parody (below). Hitler Downfall parodies, based on 2004's Oscar-nominated movie Downfall, started in Spanish in 2005 and went meta-viral. A limited search on YouTube shows 314.

This meme has found interest in the mainstream media like the Sydney Herald (YouTube Hitler parodies go viral) and later, and introspectively, in The New York Times (The Hitler Meme). Immoral war and torture are not themselves funny, as we know after recent US adventures overseas. Despite the cruelties and not just because many are "American" or younger -- people use Hitler to represent the petty tyrant inside each of us.

He's still "our Hitler" but not the one pushed by Goebbels in his "Our Hitler" speech or in the Nazi youth song "Our Hitler is our Lord" that proclaims a "brave new world"! Our Hitler is more like the one in the movie Hitler - ein Film aus Deutschland (pictured), where Hitler rises out of Richard Wagner's grave.

New Hitler Downfall parodies keep popping up in e-mails; here's a few interesting ones that show the breadth of the phenomena, which includes meta-parody:

Hitler rants about the Nikon D3x (hat tip to John Nack).

Hitler plans Burning Man from Boing-Boing last Spring


Hitler wants a united Eid (on Muslim religious differences)


Hitler Is A Meme Downfall parody

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