Digifesto

It was gratifying to read Paul Ford’s reluctant think piece about the recent dress meme epidemic.

The most interesting fact in the article was that Buzzfeed’s dress article has gotten 25 million views:

People are also keenly aware that BuzzFeed garnered 25 million views (and climbing) for its article about the dress. Twenty-five million is a very, very serious number of visitors in a day — the sort of traffic that just about any global media property would kill for (while social media is like, ho hum).

I’ve recently become interested in the question: how important is the Internet, really? Those of us who work closely with it every day see it as central to our lives. Logically, we would tend to extrapolate and think that it is central to everybody’s life. If we are used to sampling from other’s experience using social media, we would see that social media is very important in everybody’s life, confirming this suspicion.

This is obviously a kind of sampling bias though.

This is where the 25,000,000 figure comes in handy. My experience of the dress meme was that it was completely ubiquitous. Literally nobody I was following on Twitter who was tweeting that day was not at least referencing the dress. The meme also got to me via an email backchannel, and came up in a seminar. Perhaps you had a similar experience: you and everyone you knew was aware of this meme.

Let’s assume that 25 million is an indicator of the order of magnitude of people that learned about this meme. If you googled the dress question, you probably clicked the article. Maybe you clicked it twice. Maybe you clicked it twenty times and you are an outlier. Maybe you didn’t click it at all. It’s plausible that it evens out and the actual number of people who were aware of the meme is somewhere between 10 million and 50 million.

That’s a lot of people. But–and this is really my point–it’s not that many people, compared to everybody. There’s about 300 million people in the United States. There’s over 7 billion people on the planet. Who are the tenth of the population who were interested in the dress? If you are reading this blog, they are probably people a lot like you or I. Who are the other ~93% of people in the U.S.?

I’ve got a bold hypothesis. My hypothesis is that the other 90% of people are people who have lives. I mean this in the sense of the idiom “get a life“, which has fallen out of fashion for some reason. Increasingly, I’m becoming interested in the vast but culturally foreign population of people who followed this advice at some point in their lives and did not turn back. Does anybody know of any good ethnographic work about them? Where do they hang out in the Bay Area?