Putting the Me in Memetics

Ian Delaney has tagged Broadstuff with a "meme" about “Naming five reasons why you do (or do not) respond to memes”

Yes, of course - it means someone else recognises ME!

And anyway, anyone who says they do not respond to memes is fooling themselves!

To explain this point, it might be worth going back to what a meme is - Richard Dawkins (he of the Selfish Gene) postulated that ideas colonised mindspace in a Darwinian way - and thus mental genes - memes - were discovered...to quote Wikipedia:

The term "meme"..... refers to a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another. Examples of memes are tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. A meme propagates itself as a unit of cultural evolution and diffusion — analogous in many ways to the behavior of the gene (the unit of genetic information). Often memes propagate as more-or-less integrated cooperative sets or groups, referred to as memeplexes or meme-complexes.

Proponents of memes suggest that memes evolve via natural selection — in a way very similar to Charles Darwin's ideas concerning biological evolution — on the premise that variation, mutation, competition, and "inheritance" influence their replicative success. For example, while one idea may become extinct, other ideas will survive, spread and mutate — for better or for worse — through modification.

The study of memes is called Memetics, and in the 80's and 90's the Memetics meme itself was quite popular, though it seems to be less so today. Its a pity, as the study of memes is closely connected to Social Networks, and things like "Tipping Points" are just expressions of meme reproductive success, a phenomenon well covered in the body of maths that has formed around Memetics*.

As in nature, there are different types of memes with different reproductive strategies - pop culture memes are like weeds, they grow, flower and die rapidly. Great Idea memes are like trees, taking a long time to take root and grow but being extremely sturdy once mature. Some memes are parasitic, attaching and detaching themselves to greater memes.

These blogosphere memes - sort of a tagmeme - are in a way a Meme's Progress made visible (a memeotype?) and do illustrate how a meme migrates (find 5 people in your social network), mutates (we all put a different spin on it) and (eventually) dies when either everyone has been infected, or (more likely) it reaches the limits of the population willing to pass it on.

Anyway, back to this tagmeme - “Name five reasons why you do (or do not) respond to memes”. It is impossible not to respond to memes because, according to memetic theory:

1. You come pre-loaded with memes - your culture is putting memes in your head as soon as you are sentient.

2. The media is the meme - like viruses, memes are in the ether - what memes do is colonise the mindspace, much as species colonise the meatspace. Your mind (not mine, its pre coffee this am is already chock-full of memes all struggling to gain evolutionary advantage in your head, and to replicate themselves in other minds, while many more are trying to get in to your head via the radio, tv, spoken word, sight etc etc.

3. Awareness is not enough - Memes have evolved over the millenia and are very sophisticated at slipping into your mind past your defences, and the memes in your mind have evolved ways of not being dislodged - so you are responding, like it or not as incumbent memes battle with new entrant emems. A lot of time and effort has gone into understanding religious memeplexes as these have been able to control a large number of minds for a very long time. (To me the most interesting religious memeplexes are the ones that want total abstinence of all members, because by definition the memeplex's meatplex must die out after one (or at most a few) generations - e.g New England's Shakers)

4. We are social creatures, linked in our social networks, so unless we cut ourselves off totally, there is a continuous supply of memes flitting (twittering?) up and down the strands of our social nets. Blogs are just another type of social network, with the interesting charactristic of being recordable - digg, wtf on technorati et al are just meme-ometers, recording the rise and fall of the blog memes.

5. Not responding to memes (especially the basic memes like personal hygiene) is bad for your own genetic success (aka getting enough....) and espousing the "wrong" memes can easily make you socially unpopular, or worse (most people in history have been killed because of the memes in their - or at least their leaders - heads) . Pop culture memes are just that - popular.

And, having also been infected with both the meme about the curses of the ancients visiting if one doesn't pass it on, and by Ian's meme about passing it on to blogs that we have only recently started reading, we shall pass it on to similar:

Global Voices - monitor blogs globally, translating many into English - a fascinating memesource - it has multiple authors, I met two at a recent social Media Club event, hopefully one will pick this up and list their thoughts about the multicultural memes they monitor

Adriana Lukas - a fairly recent blog discovery, though I met her (once) awhile ago - thoughtful stuff,.lets see what she does with memetics

Deirdre Molloy - has just started her own blog, and has a talent for spotting emerging memes in the 'netspace

Meg Pickard - AOL Social Network fundi - ( I did read her blog once ages ago, but only came back to it recently). Get meme-ing, Meg

Lynette Webb - writes for the FutureLab blog - used to work with Lynette aeons ago, only recently found her blog-side.

*(Disclosure - we are involved in the BBC Innovations project where we will be using some of these Memetic Algorithms)