Models for Interacting Populations of Memes: Competition and Niche Behavior
نویسنده
چکیده
We make use of a set of text analysis tools, primarily based on Latent Semantic Indexing, to study the dynamics of memes on the Net. Our analysis discovers replicating memes within posts to the USENET News (or NetNews) system. We cluster the posts to NetNews into clouds within a conceptual sequence space; these clusters describe quasispecies. We then go on to study the pairwise interactions between these quasi-species by computing the cross-correlation between the interacting population’s level of post activity. We analyze a particular corpus of posts to the soc.women newsgroup and argue that strong negative crosscorrelations are examples of competition between the quasi-species. We find that high levels of competition occur more frequently among quasi-species who exist within a narrow ecological niche. We note that this phenomena also occurs in natural ecologies.
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