Each school year something goes viral and I'm right there, hittin' Youtube, gettin' my Ctrl+C on (or Command+C, for you Mac freaks like me), ready to let it loose the next day in class (we're keepin' it PG, of course). Something scandalous (like Kanye being stupid on the VMA's) happens, and I know the kids are going to be talking about it. Much to their surprise, I have the video set up, ready to roll.
Just when the kids thought they got out of a minute or so of math class, then we start talking about the internet age and viral video.
Two people see it and each person sends the link to two of their friends, and each of those four people Facebook it or Tweet it to their friends, etc. After some good discussion about how the viral video spreads, the students eventually come to terms with the fact that it is exponential and we've been talking math the whole time (ha!).
I put a similar graph into Geogebra and used a slider to control how steep the curve gets. Then we start talking about how quickly ideas spread today as opposed to fifty years ago. I ask the students to adjust the graph to show how this graph might look if this happened in 1959. Just to mess with their heads, I contend that the graph looks the same, and the only thing that I would have to change is the x-axis. Each tick on this x-axis in 1959 might represent months, whereas today it represents minutes.
Good discussion, all thanks to Kanye (let's see how long the above video lasts on Youtube before it gets yanked for some sort of copyright infringement).
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