How Do Memes Start? A Case Study: 100 Books in Facebook.

by Christine Cavalier

A “meme” is a little chain-letter-like game that people send around the internet. You may have heard of Facebook’s latest meme “25 Things” (that was started by users, not the Facebook staff).

Ever wonder how these memes begin?

Let’s use the 100 Book meme that is hitting Facebook this week. It’s a good study on how memes get started, how they change over time, and how they grow.

I just caught this from FriendFeed user Mark Dykeman:

“This is one of those Facebook memes that keeps circling around the universe. I answered it on Facebook, but since some of you might not have access to my Facebook account, I thought I’d post the results here.

‘The BBC believes the majority of people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Go to your profile, choose notes, post a new note – copy and edit.

Instructions: Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.’”

Mark goes ahead and checks off the books he’s read on the list. It’s more than 6. The list is below, but hang here with me for a second.

Before you get your feathers ruffled about the audacity and snobbery of the BBC, let’s take a better look at this.

I looked for the origin of the meme by checking urban-myth-busting site Snopes and the BBC website. Snopes had nothing about how the BBC supposedly claimed that most people will have read only 6 books on the entire list. Snopes usually catches rumors quickly, but they don’t necessarily investigate every silly Facebook meme. Personally, I doubt the BBC would have said that, but let’s be honest: They’ve said worse.

On the BBC site I found no quotes, articles, or any mention whatsoever about the 6 book number; I did find the BBC’s BIG READ list where they list 100 books and they ask UK’ers to vote on their favorites. Both the list from the Facebook meme and the BBC’s Big Read list look similar. Could they be the same list?

So I stuck them in a spreadsheet and compared. 63 of the books are shared; 37 of the books are not.

Here is the shared list (click to embiggen):

63 FB List titles on left, 63 BBC List titles on right. This list contains exactly the same books, with titles edited.

You’ll notice some of the book titles are written slightly differently, which implies more editing by the clever meme maker (who’ll we’ll refer to as the Facebook Meme Maker -FMM) that adjusted the original BBC list. (With the Facebook Meme’s “Harry Potter Series” entry, I just used the first Harry Potter book. Same with “The Faraway Tree Collection.” In a list of 100 books, it’s confusing to reference a series.)

So this table (click on it then zoom in to see better) contains the 63 shared titles. That means 37 titles were deleted and new ones added by the Facebook Meme Maker.

Here are the remaining 37 titles from the Facebook meme next to the original 37 from BBC list (click to embiggen):

37 FB List titles on left, 37 BBC List titles on right. The lists don’t share titles.

Seems like FMM preferred more American authors and books that were later adapted into successful movies. Maybe FMM heard some rumor that the BBC was dissing American authors and readers and felt like putting some of her/his own favorites on the list. Who knows?

But this meme has some of the great signs of a viral commodity:

1. The meme’s subject is elitist in that it says something about the user’s level of intelligence. (“What? You haven’t read War and Peace?!) This fosters (usually friendly) competition amongst friends.

2. The meme has a whiff of injustice that stirs up indignance. (“How DARE the BBC say that?! GIMME THAT LIST!”)

3. Filling out / answering the meme doesn’t take much time. “Put an X by the books you’ve read.”

4. 100 books is perfect. A nice, big milestone number. “16 Things” (which I filled out) didn’t take off on Facebook but “25 Things” did. People gravitate toward milestone, lucky, and zero-ending numbers in this culture. No-one will look at an “82 Books You Need to Read” list. “100″ grabs everyone’s attention.

The FMM probably saw the BBC list and wondered how many of the books she/he had actually read. Out of curiosity, the FMM checked off which book titles were familiar. Perhaps when the number of recognized titles were low, the FMM decided to add the ones she/he did in fact read. What followed was an email or two, with bragging evidence attached, of course, to a few dozen friends on Facebook. Voila! A meme is born.

People who successfully ignore memes will be sucked into this one for the false academic quality of it. It’s about traditional literacy; We all take the “How Well Read Are You?” measurement quite seriously.

I myself am trying to work on being better read. With all the hype about how the internet and tv are melting our brains, this meme is a zinger. It feeds all the fear surrounding the changes in our culture. It will most likely take off and get so big that Snopes will have to post on it.

Now you know how memes like this start. And you also know why I’m not going to be sucked in. It’s a hoax created by a smart FMM who blended some pop culture news story from half-way across the world into a pride-ruffling insult that must be disproved immediately by the educated American masses. Have fun with it if you like, but please don’t spread the indignant attitude. Reading itself should be a positive and inclusive activity.

____________________________________

UPDATE 17 November 2010: Please read through the comments, there is a lot of new information scattered in there. Thanks.

UPDATE 22 November 2010: If you liked this article, you make like these others I’ve written about Facebook:
How IDs work in Facebook: http://www.purplecar.net/2010/02/facebookphishingscam/,

Dear Abby Talks About FB http://www.purplecar.net/2010/07/kids-with-multiple-facebook-profiles/,

Ack! My In-Laws are on FB: http://www.purplecar.net/2010/08/the-in-laws-and-facebook/

UPDATE: MARCH 1 2011 Comments on this post are now closed.

UPDATE: OCTOBER 24, 2012 This meme is still going strong. The list is changing a bit, but it is still basically the same. If you want to figure out why you or others waste so much time doing unproductive things like Facebook, you can check out this book: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg*.

*(affiliate link)

Tagged as: 100, 6, BBC, BBC says, Books, case study, classic, facebook, habits, have you read, hoax, list, literature, loop, meme, read, these books, titles

Like This? Please subcribe.

Linda

When this got to me, it was 99 books. OK, so I’m an English Ph.D. and had read all but about five (ones an English Ph.D. wouldn’t read). I never believed it was from the BBC, because it was, honestly, too stupid even for them. Being an Internet meme, it’s now all over my FB newsfeed, and unfortunately, I can’t hide it.
Oh, well, the 93 books that I had read on the list, I enjoyed most.
Thanks for this column.
http://www.purplecar.net/ PurpleCar

That isn’t parochialism as much as it is automation. I’m sure that registrar was
just stuck in auto mode and not thinking. But it’s a good point.

Peace!
-PurpleCar
http://www.purplecar.net/
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http://twitter.com/Anklebuster Mitchell Allen

Christine, I just received a copy of this meme. I bristled a bit and decided to locate the source. Imagine this: YOU’RE the authoritative source!

Rumor or no, I like your explanation and will remind myself of it often. It will keep my attitude adjusted.

Cheers,

Mitch
dougdell

Excellent analysis. I enjoyed the discussions that the “100 Books” postings generated for me on FB, for all the reasons cited. I agree with NiceGirls that you need to broaden your understanding of “meme.”

From wikipedia: “The British scientist Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme” in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catch-phrases, fashion, and the technology of building arches.
The rest of the Wikipedia article is pretty interesting – for example, mimetics is a field of study!
dougdell

I vote for the addition of “embiggen” to the dictionary!
Pingback: Dear Future, this is how kids thought:
http://www.purplecar.net/ PurpleCar

Doug, thanks! Yes, perhaps I should expand my definition of meme to “any
cultural internet phenomenon.”

Peace!
-PurpleCar Christine Cavalier
http://www.purplecar.net/
GroovFlowr

Thanks for putting this together. Last year when the bloody thing went around I did the spreadsheet comparison myself as well. These last couple of days I was glad to have your data to conveniently link to.

I don’t mind people playing the game. And when I tell them that it’s not really a BBC list or claim, they say no one really cares. So why attribute it to a source that did not originate the current item? If you want to pass around a “how many of these have you read?” list, fine. But don’t say the BBC put the list together and said “I bet you’ve only read 6 of these” when it didn’t. Furthermore, conveniently overlooking the source verification so important in academic settings while posting something purporting to be academic on any level at all is simply ignorant. Why in Hades should I care how many books you read if you can’t do a basic search to see that the BBC did not indeed come up with the current rendition of the list?!
GroovFlowr

It’s definitely a fun list to pass around, just don’t go erroneously attributing it to the BBC as is, eh?
GroovFlowr

On a casual glance/skim without any real analysis, looks like the Facebook list might better mimic this one here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/mar/01/news.
http://www.purplecar.net/ PurpleCar

Thanks for the update. It indeed keeps changing. I think the FB meme is at least
3 years old by now, each year seems to have new iterations of the list.

Peace!
-PurpleCar
http://www.purplecar.net/
http://www.purplecar.net/ PurpleCar

I wholeheartedly agree. Why purport to be academic in your conjecture when
you’ve not done the least bit of research? You’ve hit upon my very point of how
the list is insidious when used in a condescending way, and only serves to
expose the sender as a fraud. One should tread carefully in academic matters, as
there is always a person more erudite than one in the subject. In plain words,
don’t embarrass yourself by buying into this meme’s tone. Instead, learn to
smell a rat in any given meme. Caveat emptor and all that.

Another quite annoying thing is this: Let’s presume the BBC made a list of the
100 most important books ever in the history of life. Let’s even presume that
the BBC claims we’ve all read only 6 of these books. Who gives a shit? The BBC
is not a consortium of the world’s top academics. And, on that note, any of us
who are actually a part of academia knows that a consortium of academics is by
no means a group from which you should exhort a standard of anything. My god,
the politics alone. They’d never agree on one list of 100, or even 1000. It’s
like asking a bunch of artists which is the best way to paint a portrait. Sure,
there are basic art things they can agree on, like using color, tone and shape.
But that’s where it would end. It’s the same in literature. There is no such
thing as a 100 list, and the BBC would be far from the expert in the subject,
don’t you think?

I think there’s a basic distrust of media, and a general repressed outrage at
their ridiculous claims that their readership can’t keep up with their heady
writing. This malaise gets its outlet when an incendiary gauntlet like this meme
is thrown down. The anger comes out and the defenses go on full display.

Peace!
-PurpleCar
http://www.purplecar.net/
http://www.purplecar.net/ PurpleCar

Mitchell,

I can’t believe I’m the source! LOL!

And I guarantee you, most stuff like this is rumor.

Peace!
-PurpleCar
http://www.purplecar.net/
Steve

Julie, thanks for digging deeper!

You inspired me to dig a little deeper as well, and what I turned up was that the poll, undertaken by the World Book Day organization in early 2007, was based on 2000 respondents who visited their website. Yes, that’s right, 2000! You can see the original posting on their main page here, courtesy of the wayback machine at the internet archive:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070305233142/http://www.worldbookday.com/
Steve

Here’s a wayback machine look at the World Book Day organization’s website announcement of the poll results:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070305233142/http://www.worldbookday.com/
http://www.purplecar.net/ PurpleCar

Wayback machine! Good show, guys!

Peace!
-PurpleCar
http://www.purplecar.net/
Alli

Memes in the US don’t require participation! The All Your Base Are Belong to Us meme in 2000 was a fantastic example of that. Of course there’s always a degree of participation because the phrase/video clip needs to be repeated by someone, but it doesn’t really fit the definition of a game by passing it on. Semantics, I know! Guy’s description of the cultural equivalent to a gene is actually pretty spot on.

This is a good site for understanding what a meme is through content instead of technical definition: http://knowyourmeme.com/
Wendy HB, Mountain View, CA

ThankYouThankYouThank! I could have spent days trying to figure out why the list my goddaughter sent me had ‘The Bell Jar’ where the list from a director friend had ‘The Inferno’ – although, of course, hellish experiences are common to both.

ENNYWAY – Your explanation was greatly appreciated: I also couldn’t make sense of the ‘no more than 6 books’ in the context of the BBC website lists of 100 & 200 ‘Most Loved’ books (and nothing at Snopes, which is my Bible!)
http://www.purplecar.net/ PurpleCar

You’re welcome! Always a great idea to look up Snopes! They are my bible too,
for internet memes and urban legends. It’s funny you got two lists. Maybe you
can post them both here in the comments? Or email me at christine [at] purplecar [dot] net
and let me post the latest lists going around.

Thanks!

-Christine Cavalier

Peace!
-PurpleCar
http://www.purplecar.net/
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http://ilgattosilver.splinder.com Ilgattosilver

100 books, Italian Version… yes, there is a localized version whith some titles of Italians authors; the list is in… italian, sorry, at the end of my comment.
In my spare time I enjoy in debunking “Saint Anthony chain letters”, memes & C.
So, my first consideration was: no sources, no dates at all, sounds and smell like a meme. Second fact: why so many italian books in a BBC’s list? These seems not to be a problem for average italian (face)book reader.
Indeed, the psychological mechanism is simple, I think: “I AM BETTER THAN THE BBC BELIEVES!” and this is the meme’s engine, this is why people copy&paste a list certificating their better-than-average status.

The Italian List:
1 Orgoglio e Pregiudizio – Jane Austen
2 Il Signore degli Anelli – JRR Tolkien
3 Il Profeta – Kahlil Gibran
4 Harry Potter – JK Rowling
5 Se questo è un uomo – Primo Levi
6 La Bibbia
7 Cime Tempestose– Emily Bronte
8 1984– George Orwell
9 I Promessi Sposi – Alessandro Manzoni
10 La Divina Commedia – Dante Alighieri
11 Piccole Donne – Louisa M Alcott
12 Lessico Familiare – Natalia Ginzburg
13 Comma 22 – Joseph Heller
14 L’opera completa di Shakespeare
15 Il Giardino dei Finzi Contini – Giorgio Bassani
16 Lo Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Il Nome della Rosa – Umberto Eco
18 Il Gattopardo – Tommasi di Lampedusa
19 Il Processo – Franz Kafka
20 Le Affinità Elettive – Goethe
21 Via col Vento – Margaret Mitchell
22 Il Grande Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 Guerra e Pace – Lev Tolstoj
25 Guida Galattica per Autostoppisti – Douglas Adam
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Delitto e Castigo– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Odissea – Omero
29 Alice nel Paese delle Meraviglie – Lewis Carroll
30 L’insostenibile leggerezza dell’essere – Milan Kundera
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoj
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Le Cronache di Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Cuore – Edmondo de Amicis
36 La Coscienza di Zeno – Italo Svevo
37 Il Cacciatore di Aquiloni – Khaled Hosseini
38 Il Mandolino del Capitano Corelli – Louis De Berniere
39 Memorie di una Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 La Fattoria degli Animali – George Orwell
42 Il Codice da Vinci – Dan Brown
43 Cento Anni di Solitudine – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 Il Barone Rampante – Italo Calvino
45 Gli Indifferenti – Alberto Moravia
46 Memorie di Adriano – Marguerite Yourcenar
47 I Malavoglia – Giovanni Verga
48 Il Fu Mattia Pascal – Luigi Pirandello
49 Il Signore delle Mosche – William Golding
50 Cristo si è fermato ad Eboli – Carlo Levi
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Il Vecchio e il Mare – Ernest Hemingway
53 Don Chisciotte della Mancia – Cervantes
54 I Dolori del Giovane Werther – J. W. Goethe
55 Le Avventure di Pinocchio – Collodi
56 L’Ombra del Vento – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 Siddharta – Hermann Hesse
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 Lo strano caso del cane ucciso a mezzanotte – Mark Haddon
60 L’Amore ai Tempi del Colera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Uomini e topi – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 Il Commissario Maigret – George Simenon
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Il Conte di Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 Sulla Strada – Jack Kerouac
67 La luna e i Falò – Cesare Pavese
68 Il Diario di Bridget Jones – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 Tre Uomini in Barca – Jerome K. Jerome
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 I Buddenbroock – Thomas Mann
77 Il buio oltre la siepe – Harper Lee
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Il Ritratto di Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
83 Il Colore Viola – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 Il Rosso e il Nero – Stendhal
89 Le Avventure di Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Cuore di tenebra – Joseph Conrad
92 Il Piccolo Principe– Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Niente di nuovo sul fronte occidentale – Remarque
95 Un Uomo – Oriana Fallaci
96 Il Giovane Holden – Salinger
97 I Tre Moschettieri – Alexandre Dumas
98 Amleto– William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 I miserabili – Victor Hugo
Jimetherton

The Book of Lists: I mean, The List of Books. A case study in the Origins and Feeding of a Facebook Meme.
(I’m not just being cranky because I have read so few of the books on the current list.) This is an interesting study.
http://www.purplecar.net/ PurpleCar

(I’m just cranky in general)

Peace!
-PurpleCar
http://www.purplecar.net/
LK

I really appreciate the useful article on this 100 books thing, but why are you soooo reluctant to admit you are wrong on the definition of meme? It took several people to persaude you that a meme is not just a chain-mail-like, participatory internet fad, but now that you are confronted with the fact that “meme” was coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins, all you can do is say that it means “any cultural internet phenomenon?” The internet didn’t even fully exist until the 1980′s! Read the Wikipedia article. I’m sure it won’t kill you.
http://www.purplecar.net/ PurpleCar

I have no idea why my definition of meme is so important to you. But I stick
with my original thought that a meme takes some sort of participation.

from
http://www.urlesque.com/2010/11/03/how-memes-work-a-review-of-the-complete-idiots-guide-to-memes/
:

“In his 1976 best-seller The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins defined the word meme
as a cultural unit of measurement – a thought, phrase, style or other cultural
expression that can be imitated by individuals. Under this definition, all
ideas and icons are memes. Religions are memes. The phrase, “An apple a day
keeps the doctor away” is a meme. White supremacism [sic] is a meme. Pop
culture, technology, philosophy and politics are made up of memes.

The word comes from the Greek mimema, which simply means something that can be
mimicked. Imitation is the way that memes spread. These cultural artifacts are
simple, original ideas that often serve to establish bonds within a group. In
Dawkins’s view, memes are the informational expression of evolution. Just as
species develop physical traits to better adapt to their environments, so too
do they develop complex networks of information that help them to communicate
and ultimately survive.”

Meme requires some sort of action. It isn’t just a phenomenon in itself.

Peace!
-PurpleCar
http://www.purplecar.net/
avid reader

It’s from The Guardian. Nothing to do w/the BBC.
avid reader

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/mar/01/topstories3.books
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Bittersweetroses

Thank you for this, I was wondering why the Facebook list came up as different to the BBC list that I was familiar with…
http://twitter.com/farmbrough David Farmbrough

Thanks – I was suspicious because of the falsely-titled Alice In Wonderland, and also the use of “The BBC claims” to lend authenticity to an urban myth…. so I thought I’d google it and …. voila!
http://www.purplecar.net/ PurpleCar

Great point, David, about “Alice in Wonderland” … The Wonderland of the
Internet, indeed. Series books and books named like “Teenage Wasteland” should
be big warning signs. Good for you on the Google search. We need to spread the
word about how running a simple search is a necessary step in the use of the
Internet. Thanks.

-christine cavalier
http://www.purplecar.net/ PurpleCar

And the BBC list is just “BBC fans’ favorite books!” BBC hasn’t fancied
themselves to be experts on literature.

-Christine Cavalier
http://www.c64glen.com c64glen

There is now a Facebook App based on this claim, but it seems to have the correct books.

Link: http://www.facebook.com/BookListChallenge
http://www.c64glen.com c64glen

No, actually it is the wrong books. Someone has already posted a link to this blog on the apps discussion board too.
http://www.purplecar.net/ PurpleCar

zOMG. An app?!!! We must all be living in social media hell.

-Christine Cavalier
Chimney Chongas

no. memes require no participation. This is the very nature of a meme – an insidious packet of thought which can infect others and spread virally without their explicit knowledge.

There is no wiggle-room. Memes aren’t games. Memes aren’t facebook polls. Memes are none of this, although these might be memes. Do you understand?
http://www.purplecar.net/ PurpleCar

I disagree. Do you understand?
Allan

As I understand it, a catchy phrase or an interesting idea could be a meme, and you can “catch” it simply by hearing it, and then it’s in your head. I don’t see this as entailing “participation” — you are passive and it lodges itself in your mind.
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chadt

hi, i’m a long time internet user and the term meme is not a “little chain-letter-like game that people send around the internet”. I’ve never seen it formally defined but the definition would be close to; an idea or theme that is virally duplicated by many sources spawning different variations but remaining more or less true to its original.

and then you can go into meme merging and other such things but thats not what i’m concerned with.
http://www.purplecar.net/ PurpleCar

True. I write for beginners, though, and I needed a definition that fit this
meme. Memes started out in email, replicating the chain-letters that went around
in snail mail. That’s the history of the word. There can be multiple definitions
and usages of words, so I think my definition in this context would definitely
be one of the entries in a formal definition.

It’s surprising to me how many people are deeply concerned about this particular
word. I keep meaning to start another post to deal with it…

Peace!
-PurpleCar
Susie B

The history of the word is actually that it was invented by Richard Dawkins in 1976, so if you want a formal definition your best bet is to read what he said when he coined the word in The Selfish Gene:

a meme is “a unit of cultural inheritance, hypothesized as analogous to the particulate gene and as naturally selected by virtue of its ‘phenotypic’ consequences on its own survival and replication in the cultural environment.”

Or to put it more simply, it is a fragment of culture – something like a story, idea, belief or behaviour pattern – that is pased from one person to another by copying, imitation or teaching. It can be pased via email or the internet, but it certainly doesn’t have to be. Cinderella; whether you greet people with ‘Hello’, ‘How ya doing’, or ‘Hi’; how you hold and use a knife when you’re eating – these are all memes. Internet memes – such as book lists or amusing cat videos – are a very small and recent subset.
Lazy-Reader

Terry Pratchett ( on the BBC list but not this one) called his diagnosis of Alzheimers an “embuggeration”, which sort of trumps most neologisms.
http://www.purplecar.net/ PurpleCar

I feel like my kids embuggerate me a lot.
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