Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Interesting but Flawed

Over at Repressed Librarian's, I saw a request asking for readers like myself to help a grad student with his research by linking to this post. Apparently, Scott Eric Kaufman is studying memes, and the speed at which they propagate. The "meme" here is that each person who reads about the study then posts the link and asks their readers to do the same. Many people have already left comments on his blog, pointing out the various flaws in his methodology, some of which he acknowledges right from the start. A major issue I see is that as a meme, this one doesn't offer much to participants: no self-reflection, no self-indulgence, no opportunity to share or write. People don't have the normal incentive to participate in memes (FUN). So don't do it because you want to: link to this cat purely for the advancement of knowledge.

2 comments:

jo(e) said...

I had similar thoughts: it seems more an experiment to see how quickly bloggers will respond to someone asking a favor and not a test of how quickly a meme will move through the blogs ....

Mary Stebbins Taitt said...

Yeah! :-( Well, if it's a real project, hope he gets what he wants. And learns something.