1.

Facebook (Free)

This is an obvious one. When considering Social Contagion Theory, there’s hardly an app that
illustrates it more than the king of social media. Facebook is an app that allows individuals to
create profiles of themselves and engage with other peoples’ profiles through status updates,
sharing media, and direct messages. Users can organize into groups and subscribe to pages
focused on specific things. This is a great tool for staying in touch with friends and family from
far away, as well as simply being a fun way of interaction with people regardless of proximity.
Since its birth, Facebook has become a major part of our culture, becoming a major source of all
types of news for many. It has also evolved and branched into several forms of media
consumption, with original shows, gaming, and even a marketplace.

This app is prime territory for the phenomenon of “contagion” to occur. As Herbert Blume
claimed, contagion is not exclusive to in-person communication; it can happen in any situation in
which several individuals are invested in a shared stimulus. While most Facebook users are not
regularly interacting with each other in person, they still form groups around some common idea
or event. While often times users maintain their individuality, there are times when a stimulus
meets the requirements for contagion, such as intense, emotional events. The first example that
comes to mind is the recent civic uproar regarding the “Black Lives Matter” movement.

This was a highly sensitive topic that, of course, touched peoples’ emotions and sense of
security. This “aroused” crowd, as Robert Park would call it, is ripe for contagion, as their logic
has been clouded by their passion, and soon they stop evaluating what they are seeing and
instead reacting recklessly. In this case, people began blindly accepting whatever information
was shared, credible or not, which only fueled their rage and resulted in much unnecessary
violence and destruction. I personally saw entirely false information shared without a second
thought or verification, and people exploding over it. Eventually, we have essentially a hive
mindset where no one is thinking for themselves and submit their minds entirely to the flow of
information on the website. Thus, contagion has happened and collective behavior formed.

2. Tik Tok (Free)

TikTok has emerged as a rather unique (albeit annoying) app and social phenomenon over the
last couple of years. This app allows users to engage with each other through short, trend-
following videos that you can share, duet, and build upon. Users often dub their videos with
music, captions, and other effects while dancing and singing. Some videos are less extravagant
and aim for comedic effect, often employing shock value or playing on a trend. Essentially, they
are “meme” videos. The app is set up for mass consumption, where users could scroll down for
hours on end if they wished, taking in a barrage of new trends, ideas, and behaviors.

When learning about Social Contagion Theory, there’s perhaps no social characteristic more
unique and fascinating than meme culture, in which Tik Tok is a giant. A meme is essentially a
single, comedic idea (such as a screenshot from a movie) that is spun in endless ways and shared
all over the media, until nearly everyone is aware of it. Tik Tok has a rather unique meme culture
of its own, one that applies more to Social Contagion Theory as opposed to other social media
because the trends and behavior communicated are one in the same, rather than a communicated
idea leading to a behavior. To me, this app seems to be fundamentally exactly what the theory is
talking about: individuals forming a group (the user base) fixing on one idea being
communicated to them all simultaneously (a trend) and acting on emotion to follow said trend.

Tik Tok is a cesspool of this “collective mind.” People are exposed to this “funny” content
through an exclusive channel (the app) and circulate content within this same channel (circular
reaction), isolating themselves from outside sources. Eventually the app seems to be its own
conscious entity of sorts.

3. Reddit
Reddit is one of the more unique social media apps out there. Firstly, one of its fundamental
features is anonymity. There are no photos or identifying information attached to your profile,
just a username. Then you subscribe to communities designed to discuss specific interests, where
you can post text and other media and reply to others’ posts, engaging in conversation regarding
the topic. Because of this, the purpose of the app can be pretty much whatever you’d like. There
are over 100 thousand communities; if you want to discuss politics there’s somewhere for that, or
if you want to have access to the most degenerate content on the internet, there’s a place for that
as well.

Naturally, Reddit is a place where lots of news and information is shared, and on an app built
with an emphasis on exclusive communities, “contagion” is high. What makes this app unique in
the context of the theory is that a user has already surrendered his individuality before joining a
community and selects what they want to be exposed to. In a way, it’s contagion by choice. Still,
it seems to fit the requirements the be considered by the theory; we have a mass of users
surrendering their individuality to the group, reacting exclusively on eachother and thus creating
essentially a separate entity in itself.

Something unique about this is that these communities, called subreddits, then interact with each
other, and we almost get several levels of contagion within the apps. An “inception” of social
contagion, if you will.