Second Thoughts

meme n.
"A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another."

I came across this word and was thinking about its chance for a reemergence in our blog-growing world. The field of memetics studies cultural evolution as it relates to ideas, and they will eventually have a great deal to talk about once we get some distance from the present explosion of cultural exchange.

A 1976 book written by Richard Dawkins coined the word, though it appeared as “mneme” in a 1904 book by a German evolutionary biologist. Dawkins took the lead and married the word to the biological “gene,” as in a unit of many which constitutes a larger body—in genes, the biological code, in memes, the collected experience of culture.

In the mid 90s, right in the midst of our Internet explosion, two non-academics (a Microsoft executive and a mathematician/philosopher) started exploring the implications of the idea in light of our age of growing information. They arrived at an important question: is a meme a unit of information inside of a brain, or is it an external cultural artifact? Internal, or external?

Today, blogs allow an enlarged pipeline for cultural information to travel—the ability for word-of-mouth ideas to appear consistently enough to become cultural ideas. The evolution of a meme is like a biological gene: as it is passed from one place to another, ideas are included and left behind, and each transfer changes the spin, like a complex game of “telephone.”

Has the chance for any average citizen to host a blog increased the speed of our cultural evolution by increasing the speed of our cultural exchange? It used to be possible to argue that the Internet is full of institutionalized information, but now anybody can publish. And the cultural exchange, which used to be theorized because it was mostly unrecorded day-to-day exchanges, is happening now on the Internet, in a relatively concrete form.

In the blogosphere, a meme almost borders the line between being an internal unit in the brain, and an external cultural artifact. Richard Dawkins called them “units in the brain” because that’s where he hypothesized the evolution taking place: in a person’s mind, where it was then reintroduced into the cultural landscape. But with blogs, there is so little boundary between personal thinking and world-wide exposure via the internet that the internal is easily externalized. The distinction between these two ideas depended on the lengthy and difficult process of personal thinking making its way into the public, collective consciousness. In our day, this process is not so difficult at all, and the blog community has the potential to thrust personal ideas into external, culture-wide ideas. Into bonafide memes.

I'd like to thank Wikipedia for providing all information pertinent to this blog. It feels like everything is at one's fingertips.