It’s all in the memes
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
Anyone come across memetic media?
The term comes from a development of Richard Dawkins’ social/evolutionary philosophy of ‘cultural genes’ that he termed ‘memes’.
He believes just as the best (or most evolutionarily advantageous) genes survive and replicate, so good thoughts, ideas, philosophies etc replicate and out perform the weaker or less suitable ones. The weak ‘flat earth’ theory is now all but extinct except in remote places cut of from other evolutionary branches.
When applied to media, memes or memetic is used in a looser sense to mean viral stuff and ideas, but there is also the sense that exposing an idea/product/service to the cybershpere will sort out the men from the boys, - especially now we have a plethora of peer comment in web 2.0.
Of course, in evolutionary terms, fittest doesn’t always mean best - this is referred to as the QWERTY phenomenon where something builds on what’s gone before rather than being re-invented from scratch. The QWERTY keyboard layout was invented so that typewriter keys don’t stick, but there are much better ways of laying out the letters from a usability point of view, - these have been tried but have never caught on because this would be revolution not evolution.
What does all this mean? Well for something like Twitter it’s almost like a random mutation of the web (like growing an extra thumb to use a biological example) it just appeared one day and know one knows what it’s for. If it proves to be useful it will stay, if it doesn’t it will become extinct, but the chances are that it will find all sorts of uses that it was never invented for, ie it will evolve.
Here’s some further reading….enjoy!
http://memeticbrand.com/
http://knowyourmeme.com/ - Tracks internet memes
https://www.imediaconnection.com/printpage/printpage.aspx?id=22266 – Brands that harnessed the power of memes
