In Other Words

Introduction to Memes

I came across it yesterday, again. Somewhere out there the idea of the web based Meme (pronounced MEEm) was mentioned. So I got thinking about the original Meme, again. It’s such an interesting idea, yet so unknown.

Memes are thought based organisms.

If you don’t understand that, don’t worry. It took me a while to get it as well. Let me try to explain (and ignore that sentence till I’ve explained). Charles Darwin invented the concept of evolution (i.e. organisms try to out compete each other and survive; the fittest survive and evolve, while the weak die out). Richard Dawkins then took that idea and expanded on it in his book ‘The selfish Gene’ and mentioned at the back of his book ‘What if something like genes - a self-replicating unit - does not o­nly exist in the biological sphere, but also in the abstract sphere of the consciousness?’. That idea was taken by Susan Blackmore, in her book ‘The Meme Machine’, and created the idea of Memetics. (All of this is taken straight from the link above, so if you don’t get it read the expanded version).

Memes are basically ideas that jump from mind to mind. They’re all around (and in) us. More importantly they, just like organisms, experience competition, mutation and survival of the fittest. I’ll explain, lets go back to the invention of cooking. Somebody realised the use of fire and thereby significantly improved their chance of survival (as the most important facet of cooking is that it kills germs). Cooking Meat advocates had a better likelihood to survive than Raw Meat advocates and thus through survival of the fittest the idea of Cooking spread and the idea of raw meat died off.

Lets take a modern day Meme that is considerably different, yet nonetheless a Meme, Blogging. Blogging is a Meme that is grabbing around itself, leaping from mind to mind and ‘procreating’ as species. In some ways it is out competing such Memes as the ‘hand written journal’, the Meme of ‘professional news’ and the Meme of even ‘Traditional Political Campaigning’. In many other ways, of course, it’s finding its own niche. Like, for instance, the Giraffe who found food where most other animals could not reach.

‘So what?’ some of you are now saying ‘an idea is nothing new’(pun intended). The difference between an idea and a Meme is that an idea is seen as just that, while a Meme is seen as an organism that ‘wants’ to survive and procreate. A being (made of thought) that doesn’t care about the damage it does, but ‘tries’ to leap from mind to mind (i.e. suicide bombing). A meme is a separate entity. The reason that makes a difference (in case you haven’t figured it out) is that you can then start examining the spreading of Memes as an actual organism and separate entity, regardless of who is its ‘host’.

Once that idea has been realised it becomes possible to track the growth of Meme ‘populations’ much like we now track the original spreading of humanity across the globe.

Then we can participate in observing Memes and, the fun part, starting and tracking Memes. That is where we get back to the beginning and come back to web based memes and Heward Packard’s ‘Blog Epidemic Analyzer’, but I’ll talk about that in my next entry as this one is getting a bit long. (I was made aware of these sites by ‘Sylvie’s HCI Blog’ to give credit where credit is due).

Interesting Fact: The idea of Memes is, in turn, a Meme which I've just helped spread (just to confuse you a bit more).

posted by Symbol @ 10.9.04