Scientists explain why Gangnam Style has become a global phenomenon

Whether the videos are widely distributed on the network have the characteristics of . epidemics.

The spread of diseases always follows a fairly fixed pattern. It broke out at a fixed time and space, and then spread out like a wave coming from the source.

The speed of this wave is dominated by the mode of movement . Historical records show that the Black Death - the plague that claimed the lives of 75 to 200 million people, or about three-quarters of the population in Europe in the 14th century - moved along the continent. at a speed of 2km / day. The reason for this "crawling" speed because of this deadly pandemic is limited by the transportation level of that period.

The spread of Black Death to Europe (1346-1353).

Last week, Zsofia Kallus and colleagues at Eotvos University in Budapest, Hungary, said they found a new pattern of transmission, which is Psy's Gangnam Style video , a global phenomenon that spread throughout the year. 2012, finally became the first video to reach 1 billion views on YouTube. And the team says they can restore the unique waveform signals of the information spread, as long as they include the full range of related social networks.

The story behind "plague" is amazing. This music video was produced based on a style called K-pop by Korean musician Psy, who is really little known outside his country. It was released on July 15, 2012, and immediately became popular in Korea.

But because Psy is virtually anonymous outside his homeland, the success of this video is difficult to predict. However, on December 21, 2012, this video has reached 1 billion views on YouTube worldwide."In 2012, the Chinese" Gangnam style "marked the emergence of a form of meme (word of mouth) on the Internet, reaching a level of popularity with no precedence despite a small local audience. baby initially " , according to Kallus and colleagues.

The increase in viewership of Gangnam Style within more than a month.

But how this can happen is the focus of Kallus and colleagues' research. To do this, they tracked the spread of the video by searching for geolocated tweets (from Twitter), which appeared from "Gangnam Style" on it. "Location information allows us to record the approximate arrival time of any news for a particular geopolitical region," Kallus and his colleagues said.

And this has revealed how this video spread, starting from the Philippines and then the whole world. Perhaps it is because the Philippines is a country that is quite close to Korea, but has a stronger connection with the world thanks to its large diaspora. In addition, this is also a country with stronger English-speaking countries.

But none of these could help explain the classic waveform patterns that epidemiologists want to see at viral events. Indeed, the spread of this video when taking place in regions quite far from Korea , looks quite random

That's because geographic distance is not the key to spreading information across social networks. Instead it depends on the strength of the link from one region to another - where more and more social connections are likely to spread more quickly.

Gangnam Style by male singer PSY.

And indeed, that is exactly what Kallus and his colleagues found. It has been shown that the geographical distance should be replaced by a more effective distance measurement, which can capture the information spread among them. As soon as Kallus and his colleagues did this, waveform patterns began to appear

They can even cross-check patterns by searching Google Trends with the keyword "Gangnam Style" to see exactly who first searched for it in different parts of the world WHEN. And not surprisingly, when Google Trends results completely match the results of Twitter.

What an interesting study to show how modern memes spread like an ancient pandemic. The connection of a harmless playful music video of the 21st century and the deadliest pandemic in human history of the 14th century, turns out to be closer than you think!

That is not so surprising. It only helps to emphasize a magical relationship hidden deep in the physical world and the world of pure information. Why are they connected, this is still a big unknown. But this affirmation is a great reason for us to continue to work on this relationship.

The connection between the physical world and the information world is a great mystery, but it can now be confirmed that it exists.