{"id":132,"date":"2004-12-05T22:24:43","date_gmt":"2004-12-06T02:24:43","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=132"},"modified":"2004-12-06T10:59:09","modified_gmt":"2004-12-06T14:59:09","slug":"meme-virus-bzz-loose-ties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/meme-virus-bzz-loose-ties\/","title":{"rendered":"Meme, Virus, Bzz, Loose Ties?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today&#8217;s New York Times Magazine cover story, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2004\/12\/05\/magazine\/05BUZZ.html\">&#8220;The Hidden (in Plain Sight) Persuaders,&#8221;<\/a> by Rob Walker is mostly about the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bzzagent.com\/\">Boston-based BzzAgent<\/a>, a company that organizes the word-of-mouth marketing equal to astroturf. Although <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/tg\/detail\/-\/0029266718\/\">Everett Rogers&#8217; diffusion of innovation<\/a> is mentioned and described, this article and the company seem to owe more to <a href=\"http:\/\/rushkoff.com\/\">Douglass Ruskoff&#8217;s<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/rushkoff.com\/mediavirus.html\">&#8220;Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture&#8221;<\/a> and the concept of meme than to Rogers. If nothing else, the success of BzzAgent, if this article is more than just <em>bzz<\/em> itself, is to show that early adaptors need not be &#8216;cool people&#8217; or &#8216;trend setters&#8217; or even successful models. They just need to get the bzz or, as Doug would say, meme out and get it out to a lot of people. This is more <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stanford.edu\/dept\/soc\/people\/faculty\/granovetter\/granovet.html\">Mark Granovetter<\/a> than Rogers, if you asked me (and since I&#8217;m writing this I asked myself).<br \/>\nBoth Rushkoff&#8217;s media virus\/meme and Granovetter&#8217;s strength of weak ties [Granovetter, M. (1973), &#8220;The Strength of Weak Ties,&#8221; American Journal of Sociology, 78 (6): 1360-1380.] speak more directly to the way memes make their way through a culture or, dare I say it, a market. <\/p>\n<p>I am also trying to see how the various parts of <a href=\"gsb.uchicago.edu\/fac\/ronald.burt\/\">Ronald Burt<\/a>&#8216;s work on Structural Holes and creativity and information dissimination fit in here. It looks like Burt&#8217;s new book [downloadable at least in part in pdf] <a href=\"http:\/\/gsbwww.uchicago.edu\/fac\/ronald.burt\/research\/\">&#8220;Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction of Social Capital&#8221;<\/a> might contain the answer and\/or his paper, &#8220;Bandwidth and Echo: Trust, Information, and Gossip in Social Networks <a href=\"http:\/\/gsbwww.uchicago.edu\/fac\/ronald.burt\/research\/B&#038;E.pdf\">[pdf]<\/a>,&#8221; [Pre-print of a chapter in Networks and Markets, edited by Alessandra Casella and James E. Rauch. Russell Sage Foundation, 2001].<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today&#8217;s New York Times Magazine cover story, &#8220;The Hidden (in Plain Sight) Persuaders,&#8221; by Rob Walker is mostly about the Boston-based BzzAgent, a company that organizes the word-of-mouth marketing equal to astroturf. Although Everett Rogers&#8217; diffusion of innovation is mentioned and described, this article and the company seem to owe more to Douglass Ruskoff&#8217;s &#8220;Media [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-virtual-communities","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pjones\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}