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Entropy and complexity unveil the landscape of memes evolution
Carlo M Valensise1, Alessandra Serra2, Alessandro Galeazzi3
1Enrico Fermi Research Center, Piazza del Viminale, 1, 00184, Roma, Italy. carlo.valensise@cref.it.
Scientific Reports
|October 9, 2021
Summary
Internet memes evolve rapidly, with new templates doubling every 6 months. This study analyzed 2 million memes, revealing increasing visual complexity and a link between early adoption and template longevity.
Area of Science:
- Computational Social Science
- Digital Humanities
- Information Science
Background:
- Internet memes are a significant form of online communication, rapidly evolving in visual schemes.
- Understanding the evolution of memes is crucial for grasping internet culture and information dissemination.
- The cultural and temporal transcendence of meme organizing principles remains an open question.
Purpose of the Study:
- To analyze the evolution of visual memes on Reddit over a decade (2011-2020).
- To investigate the statistical complexity and entropy of meme content.
- To determine if meme organizing principles exhibit culturally or temporally transcendent characteristics.
Main Methods:
- Utilized a dataset of 2 million visual memes from Reddit (2011-2020).
- Employed a deep neural network combined with a clustering algorithm to group memes by underlying templates.
- Analyzed meme growth curves, statistical complexity, and entropy.
Main Results:
- Observed exponential growth in new meme templates, with a doubling time of approximately 6 months.
- Found that long-lasting meme templates are associated with strong early adoption.
- Noted an increase in visual complexity of meme content accompanying the creation of new memes, paralleling trends in art.
Conclusions:
- Meme creation exhibits rapid, exponential growth driven by template innovation.
- Early adoption is a key factor for the longevity of meme templates.
- The increasing visual complexity of memes reflects their role in representing evolving social trends and attitudes.
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