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MEMES

Much topic

Such worthy of study

Wow

Very research

IC3 2021 Summer Camp Project By:

Together

Everyone

Appreciates

Memes

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Background prepared for this talk

  • Not as popular a topic for academic study as one might think
  • Google scholar results pretty sparse
    • E.g. no measurement study I could find on the growth of memes on the internet over time.
    • Seems like a huge research gap - probably not a popular topic of study because it’s hard to take seriously and therefore justify for research funding?

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Background prepared for this talk

  • Not as popular a topic for academic study as one might think
  • Google scholar results pretty sparse
    • E.g. no measurement study I could find on the growth of memes on the internet over time.
    • Seems like a huge research gap - probably not a popular topic of study because it’s hard to take seriously and therefore justify for research funding?

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“What is

a Meme?”

Socratic Doge says:

Such socratic method

Very pedagogy

Wow

Tasty drink

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“What is a Meme”

  • Dawkins: The Selfish Gene (1976) - idea or behavior with symbolic meaning spreading from person to person within a culture
    • Pre-Internet definition centered in an evolutionary biology lense
    • “Viruses of the mind” - Prominent examples:
      • Concept of God
      • Democracy
      • The Socratic method
      • Fashion
  • “Anything that spreads by imitation, as genes spread by� bodily reproduction or by viral infection, is a meme.”��Dawkins (2013)

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Shifting Definitions of memes

The world is divided into things that look designed… and things �that don’t… things that look designed, are divided into those that really are designed, submarines and tin openers, and those that aren’t designed but look that way because they result from Darwinian natural selection, sharks and hedgehogs… ��Successful genes… are replicators, they make accurate copies which potentially last through evolutionary time.��But genes aren’t the only replicators. There are two kinds of replicator that we can leave behind us, genes, and memes. Memes spread through human culture, as genes spread through the gene pool.

Dawkins (2013)

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Dawkin’s Take on the Definition of Memes

“An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by�random chance, before spreading by form of Darwinian selection, Internet�memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. In the hijacked version,�mutations are designed, not random, with the full knowledge of the person�doing the mutating.”

Dawkins (2013)

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Pre-Internet Study of Memes

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What is a “Digital Meme”

  • Shifman (2013) defines a modern Internet meme as: “digital content units with common characteristics, created with awareness of each other, and circulated, imitated, and transformed via the Internet by many users.”

Memes now more common because internet enables repetition - visibility is higher

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Research Questions

How do memes influence prices? How do prices influence memes?

Do memes follow price action?

Do prices follow meme action?

Do memes help in crypto adoption?

Do memes solemnly swear they up to no good?

How unique are crypto memes vs regular memes?

How does a meme move platforms / on which platform is the meme most influential a la the other research questions?

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Thesis

  • We believe that cryptocurrencies prices are correlated to internet traffic. In particular, the number of memes posted online should increase with CC price action.

​

  • Correlated or Causated? Can we prove it?

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​

Our Work:

​

  • Get daily cryptocurrency prices starting from 01/01/2020 for the top CCs (ETH and BTC) (source: coinmarketcap.com)
  • Scrape Social Networks that are the most proliferating in memes: Twitter, Reddit, Telegram, 4Chan, Instagram. (Future work: Facebook, TikTok)
  • Check how many of those images are linked to Know Your Meme - annotated memes.
  • Plot a graph that compares CC prices and memes frequency.

​

​

Research

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Methodology

  • Twitter: API
  • Telegram: Data Export
  • Instagram: Osintgram
  • Reddit: PushShift, PRAW, post flair helps a lot!
  • 4chan: /biz export
  • Imgur: wget magic

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​

  • 53,517 images in total from telegram, twitter, instagram and reddit

​

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Results

  • There is a correlation.
  • Noise.
  • Not enough data.
  • Data quality.

​

​

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Know Your Meme annotation

842 images are linked to KYM memes according to the Zannetau pipeline (14829 images passed into the pipeline in total, which makes a 5.678063254433879% of our images linked to KYM)

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Graphs

Glorious

Graphs

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Graphs

Glorious

Graphs

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Graphs

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Research Challenges

  • Engineering challenges of obtaining data
  • How to teach a computer the difference between a meme and a normal photo?
  • How to identify the difference between genuinely content and shilling spam
  • How to identify the most viral content

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​

  • Get more MEEEMES
  • Different correlations (number of likes, retweets)
  • Explore effect of memes on less popular cryptocurrencies
  • Explore if there are some big meme influencers / producers (and influence over cryptocurrency prices?)
  • Tracking meme flows across social networks
  • Email me your ideas, we intend to keep working on this

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Future Works

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The Meme TEAM

@relyt29

sk3259@cornell.edu

@suryabakshi

surya.bakshi@protonmail.com

​

@ReadyPlayerSid

ready.player.sid@gmail.com

yberkani@student.ethz.ch

Together

​

Everyone

​

Appreciates

​

Memes

Together

​

Everyone

​

Appreciates

​

Memes

Follow us on twitter

reach out via email

for clout and memes

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MEMES OF THE WEEK (MOTW)�