Lab+4

A meme is essentially an idea that spreads quickly from person to person – similar to the way the flu virus sweeps through a magnitude of people. It is culture that is commonly shared amongst an array of individuals – usually amongst hundreds and thousands of individuals. Most memes are humour-related, transferred by adolescents or post-adolescents. Some examples may be [|Rick Rolling] and the [|Numa Numa Dance]. It is actually fascinating how quickly culture can spread throughout the whole world. In a matter of a few hours, a YouTube video can receive millions of views. Social network sites such as Twitter or Facebook allow this phenomenon to occur.

With that said, there is undoubtedly a multitude of ideas and information on the Internet that is certainly far from the truth. Many ideas are actually completely false. However, a number of people are tricked into believing that what they are seeing, hearing or reading. Just because it is on the Internet does not necessarily mean it is true. The same can be said for other media. My parents believe absolutely everything they watch on the television. They cannot understand why something false would be on the T.V. Who would go through all the trouble to create a lie and feed it to the public? Take for example the [|Balloon Boy] hoax. The parents claimed their son went missing after taking off onboard a helium balloon. People went wild looking for the boy and it was claimed that the balloon reached an altitude of 2,000 meters. Instead, the truth slipped out on national television when the little boy stated that, “We did this for the show”.

Incidents similar to the Balloon Boy make Filippo Menczer, a professor of computer science and informatics, questions the “truthiness” in internet memes. Menczer believes "...a meme can be given instant global popularity by a high search engine ranking, in turn perpetuating the falsehood." He has designed a website used to identify political memes that may instead be “political misinformation”. The site allows users to click the “Truthy” button when they see a distrustful meme. Although the idea is clever, the website is limited to identifying solely political memes.

Bibliography

Indiana University Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research. //TRUTHY//. 2010. Web. 1 October 2010.

Page, Lewis. “ Tweety Profs Offer Political Smear-Meme ‘Truthiness’ Ratings.” //The A Register//. 29 September 2010. Web.