Here’s a breakdown of how eMarketer predicts market share will change for different U.S. demographics for the top social nets over 2015 and 2016.
[Update: The number of total social network users in 2015 below should be 179.7 million including users under the age of 18. All other total figures include this demographic.]
From the report’s introduction:
Millennials, the cohort of Americans born between 1980 and the mid-2000s, are the largest generation in the U.S., representing one-third of the total U.S. population in 2013. With the first cohort of Millennials only in their early thirties, most members of this generation are at the beginning of their careers and so will be an important engine of the economy in the decades to come.
The significance of Millennials extends beyond their numbers. This is the first generation to have had access to the Internet during their formative years. Millennials also stand out because they are the most diverse and educated generation to date: 42 percent identify with a race or ethnicity other than non-Hispanic white, around twice the share of the Baby Boomer generation when they were the same age. About 61 percent of adult Millennials have attended college, whereas only 46 percent of the Baby Boomers did so.
Yet perhaps the most important marker for Millennials is that many of them have come of age during a very difficult time in our economy, as the oldest Millennials were just 27 years old when the recession began in December 2007. As unemployment surged from 2007 to 2009, many Millennials struggled to find a hold in the labor market. They made important decisions about their educational and career paths, including whether and where to attend college, during a time of great economic uncertainty. Their early adult lives have been shaped by the experience of establishing their careers at a time when economic opportunities are relatively scarce. Today, although the economy is well into its recovery, the recession still affects lives of Millennials and will likely continue to do so for years to come.
Download Report: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/millennials_report.pdf
This chart from Statista shows how many times brands’ tweets are retweeted on average on different days of the week.
Source: https://www.statista.com/chart/2781/twitter-engagement-by-week-day/
Share: CGP Grey: Humans Need Not Apply (Video)
Video posits robots will soon do take over manual, technical and professional roles currently done by humans.
From the video description:
This animation distils hundreds of years of culture into just five minutes. A team of historians and scientists wanted to map cultural mobility, so they tracked the births and deaths of notable individuals like David, King of Israel, and Leonardo da Vinci, from 600 BC to the present day. Using them as a proxy for skills and ideas, their map reveals intellectual hotspots and tracks how empires rise and crumble
The information comes from Freebase, a Google-owned database of well-known people and places, and other catalogues of notable individuals. The visualization was created by Maximilian Schich (University of Texas at Dallas) and Mauro Martino (IBM).
Related Article: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/345/6196/558
Excerpt from blog post by Peter Turchin, a professor of Biology and Anthropology in the University of Connecticut. Here he refutes playing too much on the analogy between memes and genes.
The process of transmitting cultural traits is also quite different from that of gene replication. It can occur simply by observing and imitation, or it may involve active teaching and perhaps even drilling, to make sure that a cultural form is transmitted faithfully. For example, Homer’s Iliad was transmitted orally through many generations of itinerant performers, before it was written down. Culture can also be transmitted by such media as paper (e.g., instruction manuals and, more generally, books) and computers. Such variable mechanisms of transmission, each with a different range of fidelities, is another reason why theorists working within the field of Cultural Evolution prefer speaking of cultural traits, rather than memes.
Cultural knowledge, thus, is in some ways analogous to genetically transmitted information, and in others quite different. A precise comparison is difficult because, while we understand very well how genetic information is encoded and transmitted, with cultural information we are on much shakier grounds. We know that knowledge is somehow encoded in the brain, but precisely how is still largely unknown.
While this is an annoying problem for cultural evolutionists, we can’t wait for brain scientists to provide us with the answers. We need to understand our societies so that we can make them more cooperative, more peaceful, and more wealthy. This means that we need to proceed now with the investigation of how societies and cultures evolve, while incorporating any new insights as they emerge from neurocognitive sciences. Remember that Darwin and first evolutionists were able to make a lot of progress with the study of biological evolution in the nineteenth century, before they had any understanding of how genetic information is encoded. Think of Cultural Evolution today as being at a similar stage of development as genetic evolution was before the Mendelian Revolution.
Full version: https://evolution-institute.org/blog/progress-memes-and-cultural-evolution/
Just a crib of notes here about possible software tools used to screen, find and surface influencers by topic/niche across social media…
* Followerwonk – https://followerwonk.com/
* GroupHigh – http://www.grouphigh.com/
* SocialBro – http://www.socialbro.com/
* BuzzStream – http://www.buzzstream.com/
* Citation Labs – http://citationlabs.com/
* SproutSocial – http://sproutsocial.com/
Anyone have experience and success stories / case studies with these vendors?
Data visualization of Wisconsinites’ love of beer. Mmmmm…. beer.
Source: http://flowingdata.com/2014/05/29/bars-versus-grocery-stores-around-the-world/
From the video description:
Adrian Holovaty, Soundslice – XOXO Festival (2013)
What do gypsy jazz and Python have in common? Adrian Holovaty, the Chicago-based developer and accomplished jazz guitarist responsible for EveryBlock, Chicago Crime, and the Django framework, named after gypsy jazz legend Django Reinhardt. Adrian’s jazz guitar renditions on YouTube have garnered over 17 million views and inspired SoundSlice, a sophisticated web app for transcribing and sharing guitar tablature from YouTube videos.
Recorded in September 2013 at XOXO, an arts and technology festival in Portland, Oregon celebrating independent artists using the Internet to make a living doing what they love. For more, visit http://xoxofest.com.
An article by Limor Shifman in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
Volume 18, Issue 3, pages 362–377, April 2013. Shifman works in the Department of Communication and Journalism, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in Israel.
Shiftman’s paper is a bit dense around defining the scope of “what is a meme” (in particular, the difference between Dawkins’ original intent for the term versus the popular “internet joke” format such as the “Leave Britney Alone” video).
From the abstract:
This paper re-examines the concept of “meme” in the context of digital culture. Defined as cultural units that spread from person to person, memes were debated long before the digital era. Yet the Internet turned the spread of memes into a highly visible practice, and the term has become an integral part of the netizen vernacular. After evaluating the promises and pitfalls of memes for understanding digital culture, I address the problem of defining memes by charting a communication-oriented typology of 3 memetic dimensions: content, form, and stance. To illustrate the utility of the typology, I apply it to analyze the video meme “Leave Britney Alone.” Finally, I chart possible paths for further meme-oriented analysis of digital content.
Full version: