What’s your bra color – social contagion for a good cause?

Reading and debating Duncan Watts work on social contagion in networks made me think about that pointless ‘awareness’ campaign for breast cancer on Facebook that gained immense popularity at the beginning of the year. A message like the following was sent from female Facebook user to user:

“Some fun is going on…. just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of breast cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before people wonder why all the girls have a color in their status… Haha .”

Apart from the fact, that some of the messages being sent around did not even include that the desire of of the meme was to raise awareness for breast cancer, within hours, women around the world changed their Facebook status to ‘black’, ‘white’ and whatever other color their bra could be.

A similar phenomena could be seen on Twitter during the time of the elections in Iran, where Twitter users all around the world colored their avatar green to show solidarity with the people in Iran. But what triggers the rapid spread of such presumably well-intended ‘online activism’ (if you dare to call it that) on Facebook or Twitter?

In a chapter of his book ‘Six degrees: the science of a connected age’ Duncan Watts explains how social contagion or the diffusion of innovation (whereas innovation can be anything from the introduction of a new technology to a revolutionary new idea or social norm) in social networks works. The adoption of an idea by a single person depends on the person’s threshold for change and the number of neighbors he/she has in a network, equaling the number of potentially different ideas and influences. A person with either a low threshold or very few neighbors is a vulnerable node in a network. All other nodes are stable and can only be activated (as in spreading in the idea) under the right circumstances. Whether or not the information cascades and reaches the critical mass to become self-sustaining depends on ‘hitting the percolating vulnerable cluster’ at the start.

So why did these two ideas and mini campaigns of the bra color and the green Twitter avatar work so well on Facebook and Twitter. I think the main reason is that campaigns like these lower the threshold (in this case for the idea of activism) for people active in social networks. The campaigns don’t demand much effort to be realized and are potentially aiding an altruistic purpose. There is no personal cost involved to support the cause, just a simple click. This lowering of the threshold was certainly a contributing factor in initiating a global cascade.

It would have been more useful however, if the status updates actually said something about breast cancer and not just the color of a girls bra.

Further Reading:

Watts, D 2003, ‘Thresholds, cascades and predictability,’ Six degrees: The science of a connected age, Norton, New York and London, pp. 220-252.