Cecil the lion: understanding the secret of a supermeme (and its relevance to climate change communication)
Communication, nowadays, is mostly based on the ability to make certain concepts “go viral”, that is to diffuse by itself over the Web, generating “memes,” entities able to self- reproduce in the communication space. So, for years, scientists and policy makers have tried to create memes telling people about the danger of climate change. On the whole, it has been an abject failure, despite heroic efforts. The idea that climate change is real, it is human made, and it is dangerous just doesn’t seem to stick in most people’s mind. In other words, it doesn’t generate memes.
So, what causes a concept to go viral? We can learn something on this point by studying a recent meme, the one relative to the killing of Cecil the Lion. Using Google Trends to measure the number of the relative Internet searches, we see that this meme grew so rapidly that it can rightly be defined as a “supermeme,” comparable in intensity to searches relative to political and sporting events, that usually dominate the search space.
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