Meme creation and sharing processes: individuals shaping the masses

Individuals are able to effect massive online social change through the viral sharing of memes. Sharing is initially influenced by meme creators and secondarily by meme consumers, whose individual sharing decisions accumulate to determine total meme sharing. By investigating meme creation as a separate process from meme sharing, we hope to create an account of online sharing that includes features of both processes. The present work uses psychological methods, web log monitoring [Harley et al. 2006], statistical modeling, and agent modeling [North et al. 2006] to explore meme creation and sharing. Over the course of two studies, human participants were observed creating and sharing memes during a 70-day period, and these behaviors were statistically modeled. The resulting model of sharing was implemented as an agent simulation to investigate whether models of contagion [Dodds and Watts 2005; Christakis and Fowler 2012] could simulate the dynamics of our human sample.