Just a quick heads-up that Pop Culture Zoo has published an interesting interview with Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, of MythBusters fame.

Slate.com has an interesting article examining the way internet chain emails  and web content work.

Writer Chris Wilson focuses particularly on the ‘25 Things About Me’ meme in Charles Darwin Tagged You in a Note on Facebook, providing some in-depth analysis of the way chain content spreads across the Facebook network, and likening its progression to the same way a disease operates when infecting new hosts.

While this may seem a little dramatic, Wilson is by no means the first to draw a comparison between chain emails and other web content to the way viruses work in evolutionary biology.

In fact, the field of Memetics is devoted to exploring the way informal information spreads among groups of people, modelling this spread along evolutionary lines.

Much as Chris Wilson writes, in Memetics a new idea, custom or belief  — a meme — must be transmissible to a large group of people or it will be unlikely to survive. The implication isn’t that the meme itself wants to survive, but that the people who accept or participate in it want it to survive to varying degrees. In this way a meme can be thought of to work exactly in the way a virus might – to survive, the meme must spread, often mutating [1] in the process to become more adaptable to other hosts.

Some memes are much more efficient at ‘infecting’ new hosts than others. For example, chain content that is both alarming and at least a little believable [2] can often spread across huge groups of people, working on the ‘just in case’ principle. Other memes might work simply by being appealing in some way to a wide number of hosts, while still others operate on an implied obligation and reward basis.

Why this is interesting in the study of Urban Legends and folklore is that it helps us understand the very human process of wanting or feeling obligated to be ‘involved’. The motivations of each individual who forwards or changes a chain email might be different from person to person, but across groups of people we can begin to see that memes communicate because they are suitable in some way to each individual who participates.

To read the original article, visit: Charles Darwin Tagged You in a Note on Facebook

Footnotes:

1.	I.E. developing new details or attributes, as a virus might, as people refine the meme before sharing it on with others.
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2.	Though often not true!
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Arthur Black over at Parksville Qualicum Beach News has written an amusing article about the common gangster movie concept of fitting a victim out with ‘cement shoes,’ for the purposes of not only disposing of the victim, but also of disposing of his or her body in a convenient way as well.

His take on whether or not it has ever happened in real life is that he hasn’t been able to find a credible reference for any historical examples, and he puts this down to a belief that gangland assassins simply don’t want to mess around with complexities of convincing someone to hold still while you pour cement over their feet. So much simpler to kill them in a more direct way, and dispose of the body [1] when convenient, right?

Interestingly enough, Mark ‘Chopper’ Read [2] – a self-proclaimed ex-gangland enforcer in Melbourne, Australia – once appeared on Australian television making the claim that he had, in fact, murdered a man using pretty much this method.

His quote (you can see it extracted here), was:

‘It took us hours to get him in [3], the bastard. He kept climbing out.’

Of course, Chopper Read has been accused more than once of embellishing his gangland experiences, and since no-one (at least publicly) followed up on this claim it’s anybody’s guess whether or not it truly happened.

To read Arthur Black’s article, visit: Two feet equals six feet under, and other urban legends

Photo courtesy of julianrod

Footnotes:

1.	Perhaps by weighing the body down with cement weights.
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2.	Sometimes credited as ‘Reid’ instead of ‘Read’.
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3.	…to the cement mixer.
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The question that seems to be on everyone’s lips — well, let’s be honest, the question I’ve been asked at least a couple of times by email, anyway — is what do I, Murray By Moonlight, amateur urban legend investigator, think of the MythBusters show?

Do I like the show? Do I respect the things Adam, Jamie and the rest of the crew are attempting to achieve with it? Do I secretly envy them for all the things they get to blow up? For that matter, do I secretly envy Jamie (that’s him on the right in the picture) for his silly moustache and his even more silly hat?

The answer to at least some of these questions is yes…