Memes to be discussed!

What is the power behind memes?

Memes can and do run your life, probably to a far greater degree than you realize. How can a meme own you? The most straightforward way is through the laws and customs of your society. The price of civilization is compromise. Richard Brodie put it well: without general agreement on millions of ideas, big and small, the incredibly complex society we have built would not work. Our culture and way of life are based on the fact that society agrees on the memes of property ownership, contracts, how to deal with old ladies, what is good and bad behaviour.

Economists typically consider an idea’s “success” in terms of how wealth it accumulates for its followers. Memetics, on the other hand, measures and idea’s success by how much population it accumulates. With “normal” ideas, one expects the most lucrative variants to also become the most populous variants: people simply imitate the ideas of the well-off. An example from Aaron Lynch, when people saw the high productivity of early users of personal computers (PC’s), new people kept adopting the ideas until the PC became very common. However memes are never satisfied, they manipulate the host’s communication or reproduction and ensure continuity. .

We can say that memes are “selfish”, that they “do not care”, that they “want” to propagate themselves, and so on, when all we mean is that successful memes are the ones that get copied and spread, while unsuccessful ones do not. This is the sense in which memes “want” to get copied,  “want” you to pass them on and “do not care” what that means to you or your genes. This is the power behind the idea of memes. 

Use Twitter to blow my mind

Andy Sernovitz's Damn, I Wish I'd Thought of That!: Use Twitter to blow my mind.

Andy has got a great story on how Twitter is being read all over the world. From one person in a corporate position at P.F. Chang's reading a twitt from a lady having dinner in a P.F. Chang's restaurant on the other side of the US communicating this to the same very restaurant and.... In the end it results in people talking about this connection, or this trigger as Kelly calls it...

This in itself is a meme, the story of how twitter is being used and how the story (meme) spreads...again like a virus. Why? Because the story is catchy and interesting on how Twitter is being used so like a lifefeed. Will this be interesting in 10 years? Probably not, but by than new memes have long over taken this story...

Will this method of active communication be interesting in 1 year, yes I believe it will be...

The Virus Like View...

The virus-like view; ideas are infectious as we all have felt ourselves, each day, each time we hear something. Some ideas are less infectious and some just keep bothering you. We catch them from other people’s behaviour, from the little bits of culture all around us. That is great if the ideas we catch are good ideas – ones that help us with whatever we are up to in life. The problem is that ideas spread according to how good their memes are, not so much according to how useful they are to our lives or even according to how true they are. According to Richard Brodie this is nice as it might be to imagine that we are evolving toward a better, more civilized, more compassionate world, but are we not really evolving toward a world full of memes and mind viruses that replicate better, but not necessarily better for us? 

A successful meme must be able to "infect" a new host, that is, enter into its memory. A meme is presented to a potential new host. "Presented" means that I or you independently discover somethingby reading a blog for example or by observing your little brother doing something which you will copy or maybe even your child observing you swearing in a moment of carelessness and than ruthlessly starting to copy you, and not to your liking in this case... To be assimilated, the presented meme must be respectively noticed, understood and accepted by the "host".  How it gets to us is through a vehicle; the spoken word of swearing, or an email send by a friend with a hilarious movieclip or via a blog, this blog perhaps..

Memetics has uncovered the existence of viruses of the mind, but gives us few insights into what to do about them. Should we worry about what to do about them? Alternatively, perhaps we should accept the fact that our minds are infected with viruses and see what we can do with this knowledge. For example to find a usage for memetics in the science of marketing?

One of these insights is that your thoughts are not always your own original ideas. You catch thoughts – you get infected with them, both directly from other people and indirectly from viruses of the mind. Does this idea disturb you, well maybe it should a little bit... as we don’t  seem to like the idea that we are not in control of their thoughts.  Once created, a virus of the mind gains a life independent of its creator and evolves quickly to infect as many people as possible.... when was the last time you got st(r)uck with an idea and just needed to share it with anybody? Any idea what happened afterwards with that story....?

TED Blog: Dan Dennett on dangerous memes, on TED.com

TED Blog: Dan Dennett on dangerous memes, on TED.com Shared via AddThis

Seth's Blog: Best new way to make an internal sale

Seth's Blog: Best new way to make an internal sale.

How to get into contact with your consumers; go on the street and talk to them! Your free instant feedback... don't we love word of mouth. 

Although nobody knows Chrome in this clip, by watching this clip we are the ones who at least do know it now (if we did not already...)
 

Spreading the meme "Chrome"!
 

http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451b31569e201157028aa38970c

Memes? What the bleep are memes?

What are memes? For a word which is already in existence since 1979 (coined by Richard Dawkins) it seems hard to get one straight definition. Different scientist have come up with different definitions, a few here to give you an idea:

Richard Dawkins: The meme is "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation”, examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches and jumps from “brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation”.

Dawkins also referred to the meme being a “virus” of the mind: When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasite my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the same way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.

Susan Blackmore: “The whole idea of a meme is that it's information that is copied with variation and selection. So any idea that is copied from person to person is a meme. But an idea that you think up for yourself and is not expressed is not a meme. The emphasis has to be on copying, because that's what makes evolution possible” 

Daniel Dennett:  Cognitive definition of the Meme: A meme is an idea, the kind of complex that forms itself into a distinct memorable unit. It is spread by vehicles that are physical manifestations of the meme.

Concluding you could say that a meme is an idea which is present in our brain, with the intention to spread to other people, via any possible communication; the written word (offline and online), verbally and even non-verbally (sign language).  

Memes want to be spread because it is key for their survival. It is perhaps the question if you could really say: “be spread”, because this does imply that a vehicle – in this case the human being – has to ensure the spreading of the particular meme. Or could it be said that memes within a person ensure themselves that they are being spread, by “controlling” the brain. 

Perhaps a more interesting question; what can we do with this knowledge? What benefit is there to talk about memes? Is there only the benefit for the meme itself? Or can we, individuals/ consumers/ thinkers/ companies/ managers/ priests/ fans/ etc, use this knowledge to our own benefit...

To be continued... want to join the conversation and discuss already what you think of memes, please comment and lets start a discussion. More food for thought coming up.... who are you?