Spiders Georg

"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]

"Spiders Georg" (/ˈspaɪdərz ˈdʒɔːrɡ/) 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 number of spiders accidentally swallowed by humans, and saw an uptick in popularity in the following year. The format of the meme has been adapted to other topics, mimicking the spelling and grammatical errors of the original post.

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]

The meme received some initial traction,^[3] amassing over 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 "not all men".^[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]

Katrin Tiidenberg, Natalie Ann Hendry, and Crystal Abidin, in their book entitled Tumblr, link the meme to their argument that Tumblr's impact is not well-understood through statistics alone. When one user cited USA Today to say that the average Tumblr user spends 2.5 hours per month on the site, another user responded that "the average person spends 0 hours per month. We Georg, who live in caves & spend over 23 hours on Tumblr each day, are outliers and should not have been counted". As of 2021^[update], the post has received more than 1.1 million notes.^[6]

References

1. Lavergne, Max (January 2013). "'average person eats 3 spiders a year' factoid actualy just statistical error". really really really trying (Blog post). 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. 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. 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. Retrieved April 1, 2023.
5. Baker-Whitelaw, Gavia (November 17, 2013). "The itsy bitsy saga of Tumblr's Spiders Georg". The Daily Dot. from the original on December 24, 2022. Retrieved March 19, 2023.
6. Tiidenberg, Katrin; Hendry, Natalie Ann; Abidin, Crystal (2021). Tumblr. Wiley. ISBN 9781509541102.