Folks who pass along links from the Web certainly don’t all fall into the same category. Depending upon your friends, you might get a wide or narrow selection of media that people think is worth consuming. You might even delete pretty much every mail from certain relatives who you can’t politely ask to stop. But in a link economy, the spread of media is a topic that bears some studying.
And so there popped into my Twitter stream the following, from @NYT_JenPreston:
Will You Be E-Mailing (sorry, tweeting) This Column? It’s Awesome – http://nyti.ms/cJMLYL
So, now I’m trapped in some meta-paradox in which I’m tweeting to people about this blog entry about an article about how things get spread around the Web. What interested me the most was the type of things that were the most-e-mailed stories. Science did very well, for example. Are people really that excited about RNA? Well, New York Times readers are. Here’s how researchers defined what makes people spread an article:
[A]n “emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self.”
What they all boiled it down to was “awe.” That feeling of having your worldview change just a bit and then wanting to share that with other people. Of course, a lot of that doesn’t translate to what we’re passed along every day. Many things are more practical, and this economic pass-along of links (hoping your investment has a return someday) is a subject broached in this Times article. Certainly my current Twitter stream is more full of “economic” links than “links of awe.”
Come to think of it, my life could use a little more “awe.” I guess I need to make friends with more readers of the Times.
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Joshua Beach