I’m in the fortunate position in being a great lover of giraffes: fortunate in that the proliferation of photos of baby giraffes on Facebook has cheered me up no end. Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or don’t exist on Facebook, which amounts to much the same thing…) you must have noticed that there are suddenly a lot of giraffes around. Hundreds of thousands of them in fact. Around the world, people have been attempting to answer a riddle: get the riddle wrong and you have to replace your profile photo with one of the aforesaid giraffe ones.

The speed of proliferation is astonishing, and the level of emergent organisation impressive. This is no organised advertising campaign, there is no central organiser of the affair, it’s purely fuelled by the power of engagement and the rewards are no more than a slight smug feeling and the sense of belonging…