Facebook culture has given prolific birth to yet another really stupid meme. I’ve been seeing those “Name a (blank) that doesn’t have the letter (blank) in it!” things for weeks now. Stuff like “Name a city in California that doesn’t have the letter “E” in it”. They’re incredibly stupid, in the sense that I haven’t seen one yet that I couldn’t name at least 10 refuting cities/songs/whatever within 10 seconds.
Are these “like-fishing” schemes, like the ones that have a picture captioned “Hit ‘1’ and see what happens!”? Is it another kind of scheme? Is it just a stupid meme that took on some sort of viral contagion life of its own?
It may or may not be a scam, or status fishing, or whatever. Easy questions that are presented as difficult spread quickly on facebook, no matter the motive.
Daniel Dennett, presciently in 1991, wrote about how memes are subject to Darwin just like the rest of us. It doesn’t matter if it’s stupid or useful, if a meme finds a way to spread, it will. This meme’s niche is making people feel smart for 10 seconds.
I realize this isn’t a direct answer to your question, but I think it’s useful enough that it bears mentioning.
The answer to your question probably depends on the source - some of these are just shared from other easily fascinated individuals, but at least one I saw was from a radio station. Not that that makes it necessarily evil; it could just be a dumb easy update for the guy whose job it is to provide facebook content for the radio station each day.
Curse you!!! Don’t you know those TED videos are like crack for curious people? Now I"m going to have to spend the whole day doing rehab yet again.
You may think just one link is harmless enough, but once you’ve wasted half a day learning curious facts and listening to intriguing ideas and stories you’ll realize they’re worse than cute animal videos.
At least with cutesy or funny videos you know you’re wasting time, but those TED talks feel empowering, educational, like some sort of accomplishment. It’s as if watching a video somehow makes the world better.
Dennett’s alright. Despite being an older guy who is a shudder philosopher, his writing is really clear and concise, unlike most philosophers.
I’m not sure about the OP’s situation, but before that there were those stupid “Comment with ‘win’ to find the answer!” I Googled it, and look what came up first.
I fell for that on Facebook, and I thought my friend, the poster, was just being a dumbass.
“Name a rock band that doesn’t have the letter T”
I replied: Hawkwind , Crazy Horse just off the top of my head. Then I felt like I just wasted my time, and got the hell off of Facebook, again.
Please tell me, like you are speaking to a 5 year old, people make money from this…how??
They create a page with a load of content that generates a lot of pointless ‘likes’.
They sell the page to someone else, who replaces the content with whateever they want to sell or promote = ready-made (apparent) popularity.
[ol]
[li]San Francisco[/li][li]Palo Alto[/li][li]Ojai[/li][li]Chula Vista[/li][li]San Luis Obispo[/li][li]La Jolla[/li][li]Moor Park [Thanks, STG!][/li][li]Oakland[/li][li]Ontario[/li][li]Rancho Cucomonga[/ol][/li][/QUOTE]
Oddly enough, despite having its own post office name, La Jolla isn’t a city. It’s just a part of the city of San Diego. I’m afraid you lose 1 facebook.
I think it’s pretty impressive that somebody (looks like Dawkins, now that I look it up) recognized that cultural ideas are subject to the same problems as genes, because they reproduce and their success is dependent on reproduction, just like genes - before the internet.
