Spiders Georg

"Spiders Georg" is an Internet meme that began circulating on the microblogging website Tumblr in 2013. It was created by Max Lavergne as a humorous post involving a common misconception about the average number of spiders accidentally swallowed per year by each human, and saw an increase in popularity the following year. The format of the meme has been adapted to other topics, mimicking the spelling and grammatical errors of the original post.

"average person eats 3 spiders a year" factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

Max Lavergne, Tumblr[1][2]

History

"Spiders Georg" was first posted about in 2013 by Max Lavergne;[3] it is based on the misconception that humans swallow some number of spiders a year inadvertently. While not true,[4] the factoid has become an urban legend.[5] "Spiders Georg" satirizes the factoid by offering its own explanation for the statistic, creating a fictional character who skews the average by eating tens of thousands daily.[3][5] In statistics, an outlier is a data point that is very different from the other observations and therefore changes the average (mean) noticeably. The number of spiders eaten by Spiders Georg is an outlier in this sense.

The meme received some initial traction,[3] amassing more than 90,000 notes on the platform by the end of the year.[5] The Daily Dot noted at the time that the meme remained too niche to make it into Tumblr's 2013 Year in Review.[2] Spiders Georg experienced a resurgence in popularity in April 2014;[3] users frequently remake and remix the meme to center around different topics, such as the Beatles' lyric "we all live in a yellow submarine" and "#NotAllMen".[3][5] Many of the reposts mimic the spelling and grammar errors contained in the original post.[3] The post has inspired a Spiders-Georg–themed blog on Tumblr,[6] and users have reported having dreams about "Spiders Georg" or attempted to calculate how many spiders he would have to eat to make the urban legend true.[5]

In their book Tumblr, authors Katrin Tiidenberg, Natalie Ann Hendry, and Crystal Abidin use the meme to underscore their argument that Tumblr's impact cannot be well-understood through simple mean averages, noting that when one user cited USA Today's estimate that the average user spends a mere 2.5 hours per month on Tumblr, another user responded saying "average person spends 0 hours per month. We Georg, who live in caves & spend over 23 hours on Tumblr each day, are outliers adn should not have been counted".[6]

In August 2023, Business Insider referred to Donald Trump as the Spiders Georg of world leaders, as his indictments on 91 felony counts yields the statistic that the mean number of felonies per U.S. president is two.[7]

References
  1. Lavergne, Max (January 2013). "'average person eats 3 spiders a year' factoid actualy just statistical error". really really really trying (Blog post). Archived from the original on March 20, 2023. Retrieved March 19, 2023 – via Tumblr.
  2. Romano, Aja (December 4, 2013). "Tumblr's 2013 Year in Review is just scratching the surface". The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on July 26, 2021. Retrieved March 19, 2023.
  3. Roncero-Menendez, Sara (June 3, 2014). "This meme is a reminder that you really can't trust facts you read on the internet". HuffPost. Archived from the original on December 25, 2022. Retrieved March 19, 2023.
  4. Sneed, Annie (April 15, 2014). "Fact or Fiction?: People Swallow 8 Spiders a Year While They Sleep". Scientific American. Archived from the original on August 7, 2017. Retrieved April 1, 2023.
  5. Baker-Whitelaw, Gavia (November 17, 2013). "The itsy bitsy saga of Tumblr's Spiders Georg". The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on December 24, 2022. Retrieved March 19, 2023.
  6. Tiidenberg, Katrin; Hendry, Natalie Ann; Abidin, Crystal (2021). Tumblr. Wiley. ISBN 9781509541102. LCCN 2021003003. OCLC 1228881140.
  7. Hall, Madison (August 15, 2023). "The average US president has been charged with 2 felonies now, thanks to Trump". Business Insider. Retrieved August 25, 2023.
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