Occupy that disease

Social movements described using disease modeling, doesn't that sound cool?

We thought about is for a second and then decided it was a goldfish moment. You heard about the "attention span of a goldfish" concept, where the world is all new every thirty seconds or so.

This was one of our goldfish moments. There are so many bright people out there and so many attention seekers that the idea must have been brought up before.

One of our contributors mentioned a degree of unease with the application of disease modeling to social movements: it throws the doors open to the easy mental association of any social movement you don't like to a disease. With all the contagion and eradication thinking not far behind.

If we want to use the living organism analogies, why not a swarm, or fish (as we did for internet users in a previous post), why not plants. Who's to say that some social movement are not unlike honey bees, where scouts detect the delicious goodness of flowers and then come back to the hive to do a song and dance in order to convince the others to go and check it out?

Isn't the behavior of all the startups dancing in front of the media like the scout bees? With the difference that the bees won't tout a pile of fresh steaming dung.

On that subject, how long until someone uses the fact that dung beetles in South Africa navigate by the Milky Way but are lost in fog to describe some event or human behavior?

Recognizing futility, let's return to the goldfish moment.

Have you ever experienced one? What did you do about it?

You have never experienced a goldfish moment? Congratulations, you are a goldfish!