Meme

Memes are contagious ideas that compete with each other for attention and longevity. Just as genes are the basic building blocks of life, memes are the smallest components of culture. Like viruses or genes, they replicate themselves through communication networks or face-to-face contact, and they alter human behavior in such a way as to propagate themselves. Memes can be melodies, icons, slogans and old sayings, inventions, tunes, ideas, catchphrases, or clothing fashions. Memes can also be habits, norms, rules, and patterns of behavior that we inherit or pass on. In the age of new media, memes circulate with increasing alacrity.

A meme is a piece of information that survives long enough to become a component of culture, passing from mind to mind across communities and generations. Thus, memetics is the study of the components and patterns of cultural evolution, and a meme complex is an organization of self-referential ideas that form a belief system, like a religion or an ideology. Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins is credited with defining the meme and its socio-biological roles in his 1989 book The Selfish Gene. One of his controversial proofs was that God really does exist, at the very least as a common pattern shared by the brain structures of billions of people around the world. But it was Marshall McLuhan who in the 1960s began writing about culture and technology by manifesting his ideas in short, self-promulgating cellular sentences.

For example, this entry in an encyclopedia of new media is a meme that propagates the larger meme complex that there is a meaningful category called new media with important social implications. The opening melody of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, McLuhan's quip that “the medium is the message,” and Nike's “swoosh” logo are examples of melodic, textual, and graphic memes. In each case, readers are likely to know something of the history of the meme, and are likely to have other ideas come to mind—the rest of Beethoven's melody, McLuhan's full explanation of what his statement meant, or some Nike product. Moreover, these ideas will come to the readers' minds even if they have never attended the symphonic performance or listened to the full recording, met McLuhan or read his original writings, or bought Nike products. More importantly, we may not be fully aware of how we know this melody, where we heard the expression, or when we first encountered the Nike logo, but they are all eminently recognizable. Each is a meme that has propagated itself in human minds since Beethoven first conducted the symphony in 1808, McLuhan published The Medium is the Massage in 1967, or the swoosh appeared in 1971.

With new media, the same meme can take different forms, as each can be described orally, recorded as [Page 312]information about acoustic or light frequencies, and printed as musical notations, text, or image. Moreover, digitally constituted memes have longer lives and are given more opportunities to evolve, because they are more easily copied, altered, and transmitted.

For better or worse, memes are often defined with biological descriptors, as a kind of self-replicating, parasitic idea that people cannot help but propagate and share with others. Good memes self-propagate, bad memes are self-destructive. Astrology and Freeware are examples of self-propagating memes; Nazism, suicide cults, and the idea that it is cool to smoke are examples of self-defeating memes. Historically, memes and meme complexes can be traced from a period of seeding, through periods of plague-like growth, to periods in which the size of the meme complex collapses to reside among small numbers of people. However, the term is often used with the assumption that humans and cultures learn and evolve by an autonomous process of natural selection among ideas. Ideas adapt and succeed one another, while retaining both hereditary features and characteristics that make them perniciously memorable.

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