Curious about Memes?

What is this me-me thing you guys are babbling about?  The word meme (which rhymes with "dream") is a unit of cultural information or a basic idea that can be transferred from one person's mind to another.  Richard Dawkins, the writer who (re)introduced the word, said he wanted something that sounded similar to gene.  Memes are part of the cultural genome, and help us to think about social evolution.  So why do memes capture the imagination of so many computer scientists?

The Internet is the ultimate Petri dish of ideas, all fighting an epic struggle for the attention of audiences.  We have instantaneous access to the thoughts of human kind where ever we are in the world.  Contrast this to a couple generations ago when culture was still highly localized and information had to struggle to find it's way into print or broadcast media.  Nowadays, with the emergence of the social web, we can even track the introduction of new ideas and how they manage to spread across the internet.

The reason this metaphor is attractive is that memes can be good or bad, they just want to be remembered.  Most memes have such high utility value that we willingly host and propagate them.  Other memes are infectious (culturgens) and find ways of replicating despite being of dubious utility value or even harmful to their hosts.   Take a look at various Internet Memes for a list of age old urban rumors, hoaxes, chain letters, and phishing techniques that have found a new life on the Internet.

I believe that the social software we build can have a huge impact on reinforcing socially beneficial memes, while dampening and thwarting the harmful ones.  We have moved from a document and link centric web to a conversation and idea centric web.  In the near future information will be organized so that semantically related ideas are only a few clicks away.  MemeSpring is building software that incorporates this cultural knowledge into the fabric of our software tools to help us discover and filter out the ideas and opportunities that might have the most benefit for us.

Are you interested in reading more about the fascinating field of memetics?  Perhaps you should start here.