Steve Mills - Online Entrepreuership with the SPOKE system

Memes and the introduction to a new way of thinking.

This is the first in a foundation set of articles that will set the stage for a new way of thinking. I’m sure that as you delve deeper into the information that I will be presenting over the next few months you will begin to see a fundamental shift in how you view online business and marketing, how you view your interactions with others, how the media that you consume affects you, and most of all you might see a fundamental change in how you view yourself. The information that I am going to present comes from a wide variety of sources, all of which have been long interests of mine. These areas are as wide and diverse as

Evolutionary Biology
Genetics
Computer Science
Information Theory
Systems Theory
Emergence Theory
Psychology
Meditation
Spirituality / Religion
Atheism
Marketing
Sales & Business
Fiction Writing
Philosophy
Sociology
Anthropology
Online Marketing & Search Engines
Blogging

A bit of heavy list, I don’t deny that. But there are a lot of common factors between them then are apparent at first glance. They all have to do with the transfer of information, and a traceable lineage of forms and information from one generation to the next. They are have commonalities in how information is adapted and recombined with other information to produce a new form of information.

If you don’t see now how scientific and observational data from these areas can converge together and provide an overall picture, I hope that you will after reading this series. This site, Greengem, is all about the power of ideas. The internet is fuelled by ideas. In fact all of modern civilization if fuelled by ideas. People crave novelty, they want to be seen on the edge of technology, adopters of the new trend. We all want best practice, we all want to know the newest way to make a million dollars.

WHAT IS A MEME

A lot of the information below has been doing the rounds on the net for well over a decade. I’m sure a lot of you have a good idea what a meme is

The idea of Memes has been around since Richard Dawkins coined the term in 1976. It was in his book the Selfish Gene, and for the purposes of brevity below is the wikipedia explanation of them

“Dawkins used the term to refer to any cultural entity (such as a song, an idea or a religion) that an observer might consider a replicator. He hypothesised that people could view many cultural entities as replicators, generally replicating through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient (though not perfect) copiers of information and behaviour. Memes do not always get copied perfectly, and might indeed become refined, combined or otherwise modified with other ideas, resulting in new memes. These memes may themselves prove more (or less) efficient replicators than their predecessors, thus providing a framework for a theory of cultural evolution, analogous to the theory of biological evolution based on genes.”

And here is some more information on Memes by Susan Blackmore

“Memes are habits, skills, songs, stories, or any other kind of information that is copied from person to person. Memes, like genes, are replicators. That is, they are information that is copied with variation and selection. Because only some of the variants survive, memes (and hence human cultures) evolve. Memes are copied by imitation, teaching and other methods, and they compete for space in our memories and for the chance to be copied again. Large groups of memes that are copied and passed on together are called co-adapted meme complexes, or memeplexes.

The word “meme” has recently been included in the Oxford English Dictionary where it is defined as follows “meme (mi:m), n. Biol. (shortened from mimeme … that which is imitated, after GENE n.) “An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation”.

According to memetics, our minds and cultures are designed by natural selection acting on memes, just as organisms are designed by natural selection acting on genes. A central question for memetics is therefore ‘why has this meme survived?’. Some succeed because they are genuinely useful to us, while others use a variety of tricks to get themselves copied. From the point of view of the “selfish memes” all that matters is replication, regardless of the effect on either us or our genes.”

I present this because I want you to get a thorough understanding of what memes are and the implications of the idea before I move forward to the general thrust of the article series. This is not new, Memes are being used by you and against you in almost every interaction you have in the world, both online and off line. The first thin I want readers of this become aware is the idea that Memes that are around you and, more importantly within your own mental sphere.

The other definition of the Meme in blogging circles is a list of questions is sent around from blog to blog, like a chain letter where the blog owner fills it in and posts it on his site. This does follow the principals of memetics, but don’t let this one definition of memes narrow your perception of the wide ranging scope and power of these agents of information

Coming up next is a different idea, but one that converges on the idea of memes, and that is the idea of the self as Narrative