Sean's Blog

Memetics: a short introduction

The term “memetics” was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. It proposes that just as genes are units of information that self-replicate and evolve, so too can “memes” as units of cultural information.

Memes as Ideas: Dawkins defined a meme as “an idea, a behavior, or a practice that spreads from person to person within a culture.” Think of it as a cultural unit, like a song, a fashion trend, a belief, or a catchphrase. Today memes mostly spread through social media and thus there is a need to study the flow of memes through them, to understand how they influence our thoughts and values.

Types of Memes

Memes have properties that influence their transmissibility (virality potential) either positively or negatively.

  • antimeme (high impact, low virality): taboos, uncomfortable / complex truths
  • boring (low impact, low virality): random dataset, most ads
  • meme (low impact, high virality): viral videos, slang, norms
  • supermeme (high impact, high virality): wars, crisis, drama

Memes and People

  • Creators: Creating original / strongly altered memes.
  • Spreaders: Spreading existing memes.
  • Consumers: Consuming memes.

Questions of Interest

  • How do memes spread through social networks?
  • Who creates new memes vs spread existing memes?
  • Which hidden creator networks start to spread similar memes at the same time?
  • Surface gaps in scientific publishing indicating hidden or indirect censorship
  • How much control do I have over my meme intake (social media scroll of doom)?
  • Can we pinpoint the cultural shift to wokeness and back to anti-wokeness? Who is changing their positions based on memes often (easy to manipulate)?
  • How does the observer effect influence the meme flow (being aware of current meme flows)?

References