My family and I have a running debate over what constitutes a coincidence. Basically, they believe in them and I don't. I think that most (if not all) coincidences are neither random nor signs of some mystical grand design, but are indicative of logical patterns that scientists haven't yet perceived. Coincidences precede science. They're patterns without any meaning, but instead of just accepting that lack of meaning, that randomness, we can start to speculate as to what the meaning behind the pattern might be.
The most recent couple of "coincidences" involved concepts (e.g. a song and a phrase) that hadn't been heard of at all and then were suddenly heard twice or more in a matter of days. The first was "Dominic the Christmas Donkey," a song I hadn't heard of until last week when a couple of my friends played it on a YouTube video, insisting that the song had been around for awhile, acting shocked when I told them I'd never even heard of it. Then, days later, another one of my friends told me she had the same experience: never heard of Dominic, and then suddenly heard people talking about it as if it had been around forever. As Wikipedia indicates, the song has had a 47 year history in and out of the limelight, revived and forgotten in ways that will probably be more common thanks to YouTube and such.
The second coincidence involved these videos of football referees using the obscure (and hilarious) phrase "giving him the business." As the poster of the second video writes, the phrase is so uncommon that it seems likely that the second ref was making an homage of sorts to the first ref. I had sent a link to the video to my father and we'd talked about the origin of that phrase and whether or not it was ever popular, and one day later, his colleague used that phrase in a conversation.
Both Dominic & "giving him the business" didn't conform to our notions of how ideas, phrases, songs, whatever spread through a culture. We're used to ideas spreading gradually through opinion leaders who seem to be up on every new trend or through major media hubs. But it occurred to me that the internet has changed the ways we encounter ideas. First off, they tend to travel through major media hubs (e.g. NYTimes, CNN) at later points in their life cycle. Had I seen a news story on CNN about Dominic the Christmas Donkey and then several people I knew started humming it, I would've been less surprised. Secondly, the path that ideas take are an amalgam of like-minded members of the same offline social network and disparate people who happen upon the same news aggregation site or obscure blog. In the case of "the business," neither my father nor his colleague are likely to go to YouTube, but its conceivable that people they know (e.g. their technology addicted offspring) would go to such a site and draw their attention to a humorous phrase they noticed on it. Its that new combination of online and offline networks that memes move along that make the speed and direction in which they spread seem random.
We wouldn't say that its a coincidence that many blogs are writing about the same thing because we accept that kind of viral spread of information online. But when it starts popping up in the real world, we evaluate it in terms of the ways information spreads in the real world between real people, and that's where we're wrong. If five people you know suddenly start humming a song that you hadn't heard of before, you would assume they were all reading the same blog or watching the same TV show, when in actuality, they might've gotten the tune from 5 different (but tangentially linked) sources. Because people are nodes on a network, the ideas they have (about everything from Christmas songs to terrorism to sex) change at a faster rate and appear to be synced up with other people's ideas in a way that appears to violate the "physics of ideas" that we've become so used to.
