George Poinar

contagion’ in online communities and argues that medical analogies such as the references to ‘viral’ memes are exaggerating the efficiency of information spread online. “Unlike for influenza, to which you’re either exposed or not exposed, even the ideas you do encounter have to compete for attention with everything else that you’re exposed to,” Watts concludes (http://poptech.org/e1_duncan_ watts). A recent modelling study finds that in the situation of a large information overload, randomness has a large role to play (Sci. Rep. (2012), 2, article number 335, doi:10.1038/ srep00335). The authors conclude: “Surprisingly, we can explain the massive heterogeneity in the popularity and persistence of memes as deriving from a combination of the competition for our limited attention and the structure of the social network, without the need to assume different intrinsic values among ideas.” The influx of many conflicting signals may also help to explain the relatively low response in the gaze-following experiment. David Sumpter, one of the co-authors of the study, comments: “I would say that humans have different responses depending upon how important the information is to them. In gaze-following, we found a weak response to the gazes of others, while in fish and ants we found strong quorum-like responses. But if humans had to make their minds up about something important I would imagine that they would use quorum responses because these allow for more accuracy and speedier decisions.” Most of the time — as long as we are not panicking — we humans are quite good at deciding which cues from the crowd to take and which to ignore. Personally, as a keen photographer, I would of course follow the gaze of someone looking up, as there might be a snap in it for me. As animals endowed with consciousness and self-awareness, we humans have the freedom to decide whether we want to do our own thing or go with the herd.