he Oxford English Dictionary succumbed in 2003 to officially including “meme” (rhyming with “dream”) as a word. The definition is, “An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation”. A paradigm for understanding the internet, media, politics and more? You betcha. Urban Dictionary spells this out further. A meme is “an idea, belief or belief system, or pattern of behavior that spreads throughout a culture either vertically by cultural inheritance (as by parents to children) or horizontally by cultural acquisition (as by peers, information media, and entertainment media)”. UD then goes on to give four more definitions: “a pervasive thought pattern that replicates”, “the fundamental unit of information”, “an idea that spreads from blog to blog” and “an internet information generator, especially of random or contentless information”. In today’s world of viral You Tube videos, chain letters and instantly recognizable spam themes like the Nigerian inheritance, these latter definitions of meme are easily understood.
In fact, the common perception of a meme on the internet is of an idea that has taken off. As an example, see Top10 Internet Memes . But beyond this trivial level, the concept is worth an exploration. I will summarize...
More than 30 years ago, Richard Dawkins introduced the idea of “memes” in The Selfish Gene. The analogy was to genes, but in the spread of ideas and beliefs. Derived from the Greek word mimetismos for “something imitated” or as a shortened version of mimeme “that which is imitated”, memes were viewed as a unit of information that replicates: a formative entity that helps define cultures and times. Examples ranged from gestures and catch phrases to music (think of the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony), religious beliefs, dating do-es and taboos and even “how to” knowledge in a field. In the mid 1980s, Douglas Hofstadter took on the idea in his Metamagical Themas (recommended!) and “memetics” emerged as a field analogous to genetics. Meme propagation was talked about in biological and evolutionary terms: reproduction, variation, mutation, inheritance, transmission, success and extinction. The 90’s saw a resurgence of interest in memes with some significant books published. Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme by Richard Brodie and Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads through Society by Aaron Lynch were influential, as was a Journal of Memetics (which ultimately folded). Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine capped the decade.
Is memetics a real science or a pseudo science? Even the definition has been problematic. Since 2000, there have been raging debates about whether Dawkin’s “unit of cultural transmission” (that resides internal to the brain) is the right way to define a meme or whether a meme is an external “observable cultural artifact or behavior”. Dawkins himself has come to talk about different type of memes: ones that resist mutation, like origami, and others that are more prone to variation, like expressions or cultural ideas.
While the science/pseudo science debate continues, there is no doubt that memes offer a new paradigm to apply not just to the internet, but to almost any oasis (or sea) of ideas. They can be used for analysis of complex social system behavior, e.g., rascism and politics; for looking at the religious beliefs of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, the behavior of Democrats and Reblicans; for deciphering project management and understanding the popularity of “pet rocks” and “pay it forward”. The latter is the idea of doing an anonymous favor for someone, who repeats it for others, creating a chain of goodwill (see for example, The Generosity Game).
Googling on memes and mimetics will take you to a plethora of resources. Whatever else, memes certainly offer a new lens for viewing information clusters in new ways. As an example, I will end with a fascinating quote from About.com's discussion of mimetics where we find project management being re-thought of almost as a pagan cult(!):
“Australian academic S.J. Whitty has argued that project management is a memeplex [a symbiotic collection of memes] with the language and stories of its practitioners at its core. …most of what they call a project and what it is to manage one is an illusion; a human construct about a collection of feelings, expectations, and sensations, cleverly conjured up, fashioned, and conveniently labeled by the human brain…. the reasons for using project management are not consciously driven to maximize profit….project management as naturally occurring, self-serving, evolving and designing organizations for its own purpose.”
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