"Spiders Georg" is an Internet meme that began circulating on the microblogging website

Tumblr Tumblr (pronounced "tumbler") is a microblogging and Social networking service, social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and is owned by American company Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content ...

in 2013. It was created by Max Lavergne as a humorous post involving a common misconception about the average number of

spider Spiders (order (biology), order Araneae) are air-breathing arthropods that have eight limbs, chelicerae with fangs generally able to inject venom, and spinnerets that extrude spider silk, silk. They are the largest order of arachnids and ran ...

s accidentally swallowed per year by each human. The post saw an increase in popularity the following year, and 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; it is based on the misconception that humans swallow some number of spiders a year inadvertently. While not true, the factoid has become an urban legend. "Spiders Georg" satirizes the factoid by offering its own explanation for the statistic, creating a fictional character who skews the average by over ten thousand daily. In

statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a s ...

, an

outlier In statistics, an outlier is a data point that differs significantly from other observations. An outlier may be due to a variability in the measurement, an indication of novel data, or it may be the result of experimental error; the latter are ...

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, as compared to all other people, is an outlier in this sense. The meme amassed more than 90,000 notes on the platform by the end of 2013. That year, '' The Daily Dot'' gave it as an example of Tumblr's "truly weird" memetic subculture, contrasting it with the more conventional posts that the website's 2013 Year in Review featured. Users frequently remake and remix the meme to center around different topics, such as

the Beatles The Beatles were an English Rock music, rock band formed in Liverpool in 1960. The core lineup of the band comprised John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. They are widely regarded as the Cultural impact of the Beatle ...

' lyric " we all live in a yellow submarine" and " #NotAllMen". Many of the reposts observe the spelling and grammar errors contained in the original post. The post has inspired a Spiders-Georg–themed blog on Tumblr, 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. One calculation suggests that Spiders Georg would need to eat 65 million spiders per day for the global average to be 3.

Impact and legacy

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 ''USA Today'' (often stylized in all caps) is an American daily middle-market newspaper and news broadcasting company. Founded by Al Neuharth in 1980 and launched on September 14, 1982, the newspaper operates from Gannett's corporate headq ...

''s estimate that the average user spends a mere 2.5 hours per month on Tumblr, another user responded saying . In August 2023, '' Business Insider'' referred to

Donald Trump Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who is the 47th president of the United States. A member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party, he served as the 45 ...

as the Spiders Georg' of world leaders", as his indictments on 91 felony counts yielded the statistic that the average number of felony charges per U.S. president was two.

References

{{Tumblr navbox Internet characters introduced in 2013 Fictional males Internet meme characters Internet memes introduced in 2013 Spiders in popular culture Tumblr Nonexistent people used in jokes