1. Dan Dennett: Ants, terrorism, and the awesome power of memes:
If you work with people on ideas, you’ve probably seen it happen many times before: a bad idea is introduced, the team goes with it, and somewhere along the line, we realize it’s all about to go very badly.
Ideas replicate (especially bad ones) with a mind of their own. Kill the bad ones, and keep the good ones.
2. From J.K. Rowlings’ talk on the benefits of failing, and the importance of imagination:
“Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.”
“A meme constitutes a theoretical unit of cultural information, the building block of culture or cultural evolution which spreads through diffusion propagating from one mind to another analogously to the way in which a gene propagates from one organism to another as a unit of genetic information and of biological evolution.”
Evolution of Technology
“Like genes, memes are in competition with each other. While genes compete for representation in the genepool, memes compete for representation in the memepool — the huge collection of ideas that are currently circulating the world. Human minds have limited room, so only the best memes manage to implant themselves. Memes that are good at replicating tend to leave more copies of themselves in minds and in other mediums such as books. Memes that are not so good at replicating tend to die out. There is a gigantic history of extinct memes, but since they are extinct we do not know what they were.”
It’s All in the Memes
“Once memes may have traveled at steady rate, taking hold with pernicious stealth. Now contagious ideas can be delivered direct to millions through newsgroups, mailing lists and websites. Dancing hamsters and Mahir do not hold the meme monopoly. It seems that just about any daft idea will do.”
Applied to the Internet today, a meme (or internet meme) “…is a neologism used to describe a catchphrase or concept that spreads in a faddish way from person to person via the Internet. The term is a reference to the concept of memes, but is used loosely to refer to things that are not necessarily memes in a technical sense, although they may become memes when they replicate.” -Wikipedia
Applying various available online technologies allows anyone to easily follow the spread and evolution (sometimes into extinction) of a meme:
How to Find the Weirdest Stuff on the Internet
“…a demonstration of how you can use a handful of different applications together to automate the discovery of the content that’s most worth your time in any niche - whether you’re looking for weird stuff or anything else..”
In addition to the De.licio.us, Reddit and Digg trinity, some of my favorite memetrackers include:
“Wikio is a personalized page of news, including a news search engine that searches media sites, blogs and member publications.”
“Megite is the social news aggregrator for anyone interested in what’s happening right now by intelligently uncovering the most relevant items from auto discovered news sites and weblogs.”
Tailrank finds “the hottest stories by tracking conversations between blogs” and has a plethora of additional tools for meme junkies.
