Sreya Vavilala
Professor Elliot Souder
Basic Composition OA
22 September 2015
Rough Draft
How the differences between strong ties and weak ties influence how a meme is transferred?
Every day different people and groups are transferring memes onto others and so forth. As a matter of fact, these memes are transferred in the world through many different ways and through different relationships such as strong-tie and weak-tie relationships. Even though memes are passed on and on again through these ties, it is done through a different process in these ties between people. This is shown by connecting Malcolm Gladwell’s, author of Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted, reading and Susan Blackmore’s, author of Strange Creatures, reading.
Weak-ties influences how a meme is transferred by sending information to a more collective group rather than individually. “Our acquaintances-not our friends- are our greatest source of new ideas and information” (Gladwell 137). The word “acquaintances” in this quotation implies that it is better for someone to ask an acquaintance for help or information in order to get what they want. This quotation is an example of how information is easily passed on through people who barely know each other. A weak tie relationship such as acquaintances shows how memes are transferred. If looked even closer, if many people, online, give out information others would join in on the process and thus the cycle of ideas being passed onto others. Susan Blackmore the author of Strange Creatures wrote an essay describing these words called memes. Throughout Blackmore’s reading she tells the reader that the memes “use your behavior to get itself copied” (Blackmore 37). From the deduction of Gladwell’s quotation about acquaintances and weak tie relationships, we can get that Blackmore is trying to say that all one meme needs is to be spread through a hug group and keep spreading like wildfire in order to survive. Within the quotation, the key word is “behavior”. This word describes the way memes can get transferred immediately through not one’s own digression but through people’s interactions with each other. Within Gladwell’s reading, he talks about an example of a weak-tie relationship, a young man named Bhatia who needs a bone-marrow transplant but can’t seem to find someone who has a matching one to his and then his colleague/partner gave the idea about the using Facebook to get a collective group of people going all the way from one to “thousands of people to sign up for a donor registry, because doing so is pretty easy”, he spoke about how not knowing many of the people and just having social networking with them helped Bhatia find a matching bone-marrow (Gladwell 138). The weak-tie relationship brought about a new idea and action in order to get someone you don’t know to do something on your behalf. This shows how memes do not need people who have strong relationships with others to pass on information and for new ideas to be born. Just as Gladwell stated about the actions done by people in Bhatia’s situation, Blackmore stated, “When you imitate someone else, something is passed on. This ‘something’ can then be passed on again, and again, and so take on a life of its own” to show that people can get a meme without even knowing they have it (Blackmore 34). This is related to what Gladwell was saying about the bone-marrow DNA strategy because the way the DNA information on bone-marrow was passed on by thousands of people is similar to how a meme is passed on from person to person. Every day there are so many ideas and instructions being executed that influence how memes are being passed on. When Blackmore says that memes just “want is to be passed on to the next generation” she is suggesting that in order for anything “to be passed on” there is a need for people to sacrifice and a need for a leader (Blackmore 35). The phrase “to be passed on” indicates that memes are ideas that want to go from one person to the next to survive on. This quotation connects with what Gladwell states about how “networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals” (Gladwell 139). At times the strength of weak-ties can be helpful enough to get a meme to spread through a number of people but it is not always going to work out since there aren’t many people who are willing to sacrifice something very important to them, in addition to such relationships not having a “centralized leadership structure” where there is someone talking to the group and helping with organizing and progressing through events and activities. As for strong-tie relationships, which help build a strong foundation for the memes that are being transferred to others since there is a centralized authority figure where the people are organized in order to accomplish hard tasks like high-risk activism, as Gladwell also mentions throughout his reading. The discipline and strategy are also shown to be helpful because without strategy all of the people would be confused and no one would be giving others that idea and new information in other words called a meme. Also, strong-ties will help people adapt to the behaviors of their other friends and will help with ‘something’ passing onto the next person and this process goes on continuously. Strong-ties and weak-ties relationships approach the transfer of memes differently. Strong-ties relationships transfer memes individually than in groups while weak-ties relationships transfer memes collectively than to individuals. Gladwell stated that “the absence of central authority, the unchecked autonomy of rival groups, and the inability to arbitrate quarrels through formal mechanisms- made the P.L.O. excessively vulnerable to outside manipulation and internal strife”, this quotation states that weak-ties are a source of new memes spreading, using social media and networking between thousands of people (Gladwell 140). While strong-ties organizations are built off of people’s sacrifice, motivation, leadership, discipline, and strategy in order to transfer a meme to others, “i.e. each group was task-oriented and coordinated its activities through authority structures…Individuals were held accountable for their assigned duties, and important conflicts were resolved by the minister, who usually exercised ultimate authority over the congregation” (Gladwell 139). These are both similar to what Blackmore says during her reading. She tells us that “something, some kind of information, some kind of instruction, has become lodged in all those brains” through the spreading of memes through these two different processes (Blackmore 37). Strong-ties and weak-ties both influence how memes are transferred in every day events. It is shown through Gladwell’s reading that strong tie relationships transfer memes through people’s sacrifice and thorough participation in an activity while weak tie relationships memes are transferred to other people through easy social networks and media sites and require less amount of participation and there is less risk. While in Blackmore’s reading, memes are the ideas and hand-me downs that are transferred to others very quickly in order to live on whether it is an imitation of another idea or not. Memes do not need people who have strong relationships to pass by. All one meme needs is to be spread through a huge group and keep spreading like wildfire in order to survive. While strong-ties do influence memes individually than in large groups, weak-ties influence more people through the use of social networks and social media sites. This is because strong-tie friend groups tend to be involved in similar likes and not involved in activities they don’t like.