Meme Tune

I'm guessing most internet savvy people have come across the phrase "meme" before and most of us think we understand what it means but I recently discovered that there are people who are really developing this idea as the next big thing in psychology and potentially a huge evolutionary leap forwards.

As I understood it, in the normal web-context of things, a meme is a theme or an idea that is picked up by a large number of intenet commentators/ users/ posters and discussed or debated. It is a current hot topic, if you like.

In scientific terms a meme is to psychology what a gene is to biology. It's described as "the basic building blocks of the mind." In memetic terms we find memes everywhere, they are the things that condition the way we think about the world, so an advert can be a meme, a pop song can be a meme, a conversation with a friend can be a meme, a picture can be a meme and so on. Almost anything that we come in to contact with (maybe everything) is a meme.

The flipside of this is that the the majority of us can (and probably are) infected by "mind viruses" where our world view is not true and is not our own, but has been "infected" by people who want their own world view to prevail. You only have to look at the world of advertising or politics to see how information and images can be manipulated to present a view of the world that favours one particular interest group.

One interesting application that I've heard of is the potential to use the research on memetics to produce better communities, to find a way to promote postive memes so that, on a simplistic level maybe, people have a positive outlook towards the place where they live; which in turn produces an environment where crime, vandalism, truancy, etc become less and less prevelant.

I seem to remember Malcolm Gladwell writing about some of the changes that took place in New York when they started to clean up the street and subway system which would appear to back this up.

From what I can tell Gods Debris by Dilbert Creator, Scott Adams is largely about memetics. The book is available as a free download if you're interested.

Fascinating topic but I need to read more.

Have some links to start you off:

Meme Central

Definition of Memetics

Memetics publications on the web

Gods Debris - Free Download