Modeling and simulating the emergence of Internet communities: impact of the spread of memes and agent memory

The spreading of memes on the web played an important role in the emergence of Internet communities. The principal purpose of the study is to implement a simulation model to analyze the process of emergence of Internet communities. The model shows the importance of factors such as the interactions between online agents as well as their propensity to adopt and remember new memes. In addition, it explores the threshold between isolated cultural short-lived trends and the viral spreading of many cultural features. The simulation model is an agent-based model built using NetLogo software, designed such that agents represent Internet users and memes are represented by features appearing randomly on each agent. The model illustrates the spread across the whole network as shown through interactions of agents indicating further, that the structure of the network, especially the number of indegree and outdegree links between agents, has a crucial influence on how many memes are shared among agents in the long run. In other words, a greater connectivity leads to the quick sharing and sustainability of several cultural features, which is the basis for the emergence of a community.