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The Ingredients : Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted

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The Ingredients to Make Memes Successful Successful memes facilitate humans to learn, acquire, and transmit new ideas and behaviors. In Susan Blackmore’s essay “Small Creature,” she proposes that memes are the ideas and beliefs that pass on through generation. Moreover, she believes that humans’ behaviors are greatly influenced and solely dominated by memes. But there is an important omission that left untouched in her essay. Blackmore lacks a clear explanation of what exactly contribute to the success of a meme’s transmission. However, when exploring in the Malcolm Gladwell’s “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” we could find out that he suggests many valuable illustrations of how successful memes are transmitted and what ingredients contribute to the success. In his interesting piece, he regards successful memes as strong ties, while unsuccessful one as weak ties. In a strong-tie relationship, people keep frequent contact in-person and have shared personal history, whereas a weak-tie is with tenuous relationship. Furthermore, He argues that social media and online communications connect people with weak ties that do not profoundly influence real social change and justice. On the other hand, Gladwell cites Civil Rights Movement as a strong-tie phenomenon that motivates people to devote real sacrifice. To answer the question then of what makes one meme popular and another one not, even though memes can be transmitted discretionarily, personal

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