An Academic Chain Letter

Via BitchPh.D., help for a poor graduate student in desperate circumstances.

Scott Eric Kaufman will be presenting a paper as part of a panel about Blogs at the MLA Convention.  He's now tracking the speed of a post's transmission from blog to blog to test his theory of how blog communication works.

Most memes, I'd wager, are only superficially organic: beginning small, they acquire minor prominence among low-traffic blogs before being picked up by a high-traffic one, from which many more low-traffic blogs snatch them.    Contra blog-triumphal models of memetic bootstrapping, I believe most memes are — to borrow a term from Daniel Dennett's rebuttal of punctuated equilibrium — "skyhooked" into prominence by high-traffic blogs.

A definitions note: Strictly speaking, Kaufman here uses the word "meme" in its Dawkins sense, not in its Quizilla sense.

Kaufman would like you, me, and our cats* to mention his experiment on our blogs (all blogs count, no matter what the hosting service); link to his pleading post for participation; and then ping our blogs at Technorati.

I think it would help his study if you mentioned the blog where you first heard about this experiment, but that's just me.

There may be methodological problems with this experiment, but I assume that Kaufman has also done some close reading of Technorati links for one or more randomly chosen popular blog topics to buttress his claims.

For those unclear of the Technorati ping procedure, here's a quick summary: either enter your blog's URL into the box on their ping page after you've posted your plea/invitation/chain letter, or trackback the code listed on their ping page. 

I'm urging you to do this even though I am, almost by definition, exceedingly bitter that anyone  can do academic work on the subject of blogs.  Clearly I chose the wrong academic field, because my own presentation at a national academic conference not only required me to leave the house to do field research, it also didn't do a damn thing for my blog traffic.

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* Speaking of cats, last week, Elba did a journal project at school in which the students were given the prompt "I am thankful for" and then asked to use invented spelling to fill in the blanks.  Right now, Elba struggles with invented spelling.  She knows that words are supposed to have more than one or two letters, so even when the only sound she can "pull out of her mouth" is the first or last sound in a word, she adds a lot of extra letters to the "word" -- mostly Xs and Ks.  But she knows that doesn't look right, either.

For her project, Elba drew a picture of herself, in a well-furnished room, with a small furry animal in the corner.  She wrote "I am thankful for my dxxkl."  Then she erased her last word and wrote, "cat."

We don't have a cat.

When you can't write what you know, you write what you can.

[On re-reading this entry after publishing it, the Elba anecdote -- in combination with the not-clearly-and-yet-definitely-sarcastic claim of bitterness -- could be construed as a slam on Mr. Kaufman.  It is not.  Oops.]

Comments

[lynn]

Go Elba! I took French in elementary school, and we used to have homework assignments to write short essays like "what I do after school." I totally wrote about whatever I knew how to say, true or not.

Last year my son wrote at preschool that he was thankful for k'nex, but he didn't have any... I think he meant that he was wishful for k'nex.

[Emma Jane]

Maybe I should wait two or three months, then link to the study... just to be, you know, realistic about my level of connection to the zetigeist.

[Moxie]

What if I don't post this until tomorrow, because I started my own meme today? Does that screw up the whole experiment?

[Miche]

At the risk of being scolded by you for plagerism, I've completed my post.

[maggie]

Scratching my head here, but I'll try and join in. Ping? Technorati? At least I know what a meme is.

[Lilian]

Hmmm, only now I'm having the time to read this post (I'm still trying to play catch up because of all the travels, etc, lat week).

I had seen the MLA panel in my program already (I'm presenting too, woo-hoo!) and I really want to attend (although it will probably be PACKED), so now I want to participate in the study as well.