The Lifecycle of Memes.doc

The Lifecycle of MemesBy Henrik Bjarneskans, Bjarne Gr鴑nevik and Anders Sandberg AbstractMemes, self reproducing mental information structures analogous to genes in biology, can be seen as the basis for an explanatory model of cultural and psychological behaviour. Their properties and effects are evolutionary conditioned and ultimately seeks to promote their replication. To survive in a context the memes must meet certain conditions. We abstract a model of these conditions and use it to analyse three well-known memes: the Kilroy was here graffiti, urban legends and Christianity. Table of ContentsAbstract1. What is a Meme? 1.1 Defining Memes1.2. Issues in Memetics2. The Lifecycle of Memes2.1. Transmission Phase2.2. Decoding2.3. Infection Phase2.4. Encoding and Spread2.5. Summary of Model 3. Three Illuminating Examples 3.1. The Kilroy Was Here Meme3.2. Urban Legends3.3. ChristianityFootnotes References 1. What is a Meme?Memes were originally described by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene (1976) 1 a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. - - -Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. Just as genes propagate in the gene pool via a process which, in the broad sense can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures . If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. What makes the meme concept so powerful is its close analogies to the theory of natural selection. Natural selection occurs whenever the following conditions exist (Dennet 1990): 1. Variation: a continuing abundance of different elements. 2. Heredity or replication: the elements have the capacity of creating copies or replicas of themselves. 3. Differential fitness: the number of copies of an element that are created in a given time varies, depending on the interaction between the features of that element (whatever it is that makes it different from other elements) and features of the environment in which it persists. This is a quite general definition which is not limited to biology, and suggests that memes are subject to natural selection: they vary (due to mutations in transmission or mental storage, plus deliberate changes), they replicate (by definition) and have differing fitness. This leads to phenomena of competition, co-evolution, population dynamics and adaptation surprisingly similar to their biological counterparts. The set of shared memes form the memepool (in analogy with the genepool). It should be noted that human decisions are part of the memetic selection process; from the perspective of the memetic ecology humans and human behaviour corresponds to the climatic and geological environment of biological life. In the meme perspective, it is more accurate to say that the message has evolved into its form in order to encourage people to spread it than to say that people have selected or bred the message into its form. Although people often make the decision to spread a meme or not consciously, this process is influenced by the meme. Some memes are viewed as important, and hence spread to others after a conscious and sometimes rational evaluation; some memes exploit aspects of cognition or emotion to bias their hosts to spread them. Natural selection favours memes that are good at reproducing, which suggests that in time there will exist many memes that are very efficient replicators. Their accuracy is irrelevant for their survival, only their ability to replicate and find new hosts; memes that interest people and encourage them to spread the meme will thrive at the expense of less attractive versions. What makes the meme perspective so interesting is that it suggests that some of what we have learned from biology can be applied to human psychology. Dawkins points out that a cultural trait may have evolved in the way it has simply because it is advantageous to itself . Gross (1996) says The main shift in thinking that needs to take place is to look at the spread of the legend not so much from the point of view of the people who propagate the warning, but from the point of view of the warning itself. In memetics, ideas are viewed as almost independent creatures in a symbiotic relationship with human minds and cultures. 1.1 Defining MemesThe meme concept is somewhat slippery to define, and there is an multitude of definitions ranging from the very wide to the very narrow. The definition of meme we will use in this essay is A meme is a (cognitive) information-structure able to replicate using human hosts and to influence their behaviour to promote replication. This is a somewhat strict definition, since it excludes many structures able to replicate without influencing host behaviour or using non-human hosts such as chimpanzees, dolphins and computers. It can be seen as a subset of the more general memes described by Dawkins. Memes do not only influence behaviour to promote replication, but many of the most successful memes have other side-effects (for example, being able to invoke various emotions) or promote their replication by being useful or through other features (like parasiting on other memes, e.g. parodies and imitations); using a biological analogy one could say symbiotic memes spread mainly using their usefulness, while parasitic memes compel the host to spread them. This compulsion can be more or less subtle, ranging from explicit orders like in chain letters (Send ten copies of this letter to your friends) to implicit influences that link with our attitudes like the Save the whales meme described in (Hofstadter 1985, p. 55). It is quite common that memes are confused with ideas/thoughts. Both are cognitive structures, but an idea is not self-replicating and is spread passively (i.e. for extrinsic reasons) if it is spread beyond its initial host at all. The difference is sometimes hazy; the idea Isnt it time for us to eat? can easily spread in a small group, but will not spread well outside the group and will disappear once the question is settled, while a meme usually can spread generally and does not have any limited lifespan. It should also be noted that memes often form meme complexes, groups of memes mutually supporting each other and replicating together. The dividing line between a meme and a meme complex is yet again diffuse. In this text we will not try to distinguish between the two. 1.2. Issues in Memetics1.2.1. The Meme - Gene AnalogyMuch fuss has been made over this analogy since it was introduced by Dawkins in his The Selfish Gene. When Dawkins introduced this analogy it was to give us a meaningful comparison in the light of which we would better understand the concept of memes. This was done to help our initial phase of understanding; unfortunately, many memeticists has not left this area. Many writers have scrutinised the comparison with the gene to see if it really is analogous or not, i.e. Hans-Cees Speel (1996). Although this has provided interesting reading we feel that it is a bit beside the point. The importance of memes lies not in whether they are mental copies of the genes and obey the same laws as the genes do or dont, but rather in how they work and what they are capable of (and not capable of). We do not feel that you can reach a complete understanding of this only by comparing them to other things. You have to study the idea of memes in it self. This is why we have chosen to make a detailed study of what we can call the memetic life-cycle, to try to discover its inner memetic workings. Our aim is to find a model that, whether analogous to the genetic life-cycle or not, is sound and supported by studies of existing memes. 1.2.2. DefinitionsIn the field of memetics there are a couple of different definitions of host, vector and meme around, and there is a tendency to make these wide to the point of being meaningless. We want operational definitions that are usable and still distinct. Therefore, in this paper, we are going to use the words host and vector as such (meme has already been defined above): Host = A host must be able to possess at least the potential capacity to elaborate on the meme and to perform those cognitive tasks connected to the meme that we normally refer to as understanding. This means that only humans can be hosts (animals can perhaps become hosts for simpler memes, but we will not discuss this here), at least until the development of artificial intelligences reaches further. Vector = A vector is anything that transports the meme between hosts without the capacity to reflect on the meme. Examples are a wall, a voice, an email-program, or a picture. Can a human be a vector? Yes she can, if she lacks the cognitive capacity (or interest) to elaborate on a specific meme. Then she is just a non-reflective carrier of the meme, much the same as a book. Note though that the human vector is still a potential host - or inactive host (Grant, 1990) - for the meme, should she suddenly choose to analyse the meme (in its widest sense) or achieve the contextual understanding which would make this possible. 1.2.3. The Conscious MemeIt is worth noting that although the terminology used in genetics and memetics sometimes seems to indicate that genes and memes act upon their own conscious will, this is of course not the case. Genes and memes are not conscious, and they do not have a will as such to act upon. But it is practical and economical to speak as if they do, since their behaviour follows such patterns. This way of speaking can be seen as lazy shorthand; a meme wants X means the fitness of a meme is enhanced by X. 2. The Lifecycle of MemesMemes have a life-cycle similar to parasites (Fig 1). During the transmission phase of the meme it is encoded in a vector, such as a spoken message, text, image, email, observed behaviour or slab of stone. When a potential host decodes the meme (reads the text, hears the message) the meme may become active and infects the person, who becomes a new host (the infection phase). At some point the meme is encoded in a suitable vector (not necessarily the same medium it was originally decoded from) and can be spread to infect new hosts. This division of the lifecycle makes it easier to discuss memetic selection criteria, such as the list proposed by Heylighen (1994): Contribution to individual fitness (how the meme enhances the fitness of its host) Reliability of predictions Learnability Ease of communication Tendency to be transmitted Conformity pressure (meme selfishness; how the meme interacts with other memes in the host) Collective fitness (how the meme enhances the fitness of the group or social system of its hosts). or other, more elaborate divisions such as (Hale-Evans 1995). In the following we will discuss the intrinsic factors of the meme that contributes to its fitness, and those external factors that mesh with them. We will look at the factors that help or hinder a meme in each of the phases of its lifecycle as depicted in Figure 1. These factors will be summarized below in an extended version of the model (Figure 2). A successful meme will be good at exploiting these factors in its environment, while memes that cannot exploit them well will be out-competed and eventually go extinct. If one phase presents an insurmountable obstacle to the meme, it will be unable to reproduce and survive. This allows us to make estimates of memetic viability. 2.1. Transmission PhaseIn the transmission phase the meme is encoded in a vector, some kind of information- carrying medium. Which medium is used strongly depends on the meme, both how it can be expressed (influenced by its complexity, the need for copying-fidelity and the requirements of its semantic form) and how it wants to be expressed. Often the medium is strongly linked with the meme or an actual part of it, as in the case of the Kilroy was here meme where part of the meme is the graffiti itself, suggesting the possibility of scrawling it on some suitable surface; The medium is the message as Marshall McLuhan put it. Memes are able to shift between media, sometimes with a mutating effect on the meme (such as the major differences between the Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo and the same story told by Disney). It is interesting to see how memes and media have co-evolved: many media have been developed as memetic vectors, able to encode memes indefinitely and with a high degree of exactness, while memes have evolved to use them and exploit their peculiarities. Dawkins (1976) suggests three qualities of a meme that gives it a high survival value: longevity, fecundity and copying fidelity. Longevity and copying-fidelity are most significant in the transmission phase (although longevity can also be seen as the memes ability to remain in memory for a long time), and are strongly linked with the properties of the medium. Heylighen (1994) also points out that ease of communication increases memetic fitness, either through creating salient behaviour that is easy to imitate or by being able to be clearly expressed. 2.1.1. Reproduction AbilityThe more copies of itself a meme can encode in vectors, the higher fitness does it have (by definition). This implies that memes would thrive in media where it is easy to make numerous copies and distribute them widely. From a memetic standpoint, the ideal medium is a broadcast medium where many copies can be made cheaply. If it is one-to- many such as radio, then the memes of the broadcaster will spread with little feedback; this supports a less diverse memetic ecology than a many-to-many network, but also promotes the memes of the sender more strongly. In a many-to-many medium such as the Internet there are multiple meme sources, and the memetic diversity is high. Two typical examples of the influence of reproduction ability are xeroxlore (You dont have to be insane to work here, but it helps) that can be found in almost every modern office thanks to photocopiers, and Internet spams (Make Money Fast!) that thrive in the broadcast environment of the Internet; neither meme would be possible without easy copying. 2.1.2. Copying FidelityWhile mutation leads to evolution, it also risks to destroy or degrade the meme. Just as in biological organisms a balance has to exist between evolvability and copying fidelity (Kelly 1994, p. 537). Many memes have properties that enhance their copying fidelity, often by making errors in encoding noticeable (note the analogy to error-detecting and -correcting codes cf. (Biggs 1985). 2.1.2.a. Non-alteration PolicySome memes explicitly forbid any alteration of themselves, such as the instructions given in chain letters, the copyright notices of public domain information (only unaltered copying is allowed) and many sacred formulae, that warn of awful consequences if they should be altered. They increase their copying fidelity by making the host careful in encoding them well. 2.1.2.b. StructureCohesiveness may also improve copying fidelity by introducing patterns that support the copying and transmission process. Poetry becomes stable by using rhyme and meter, since mutations create obvious errors that can be corrected. Many memes contain noteworthy features such as humour, commonly known symbols or repetition (cf. the common use of groups of three in myths). Incidentally, these properties also make memory encoding and retrieval easier. 2.1.2.c. SimplicityAnother way of achieving high copying fidelity and a low mutation rate is simplicity. A short meme is less likely to be changed, and may even be brittle ?any change makes it obviously unusable to the encoder, and thus prevents mutation. Longer or larger memes can survive only in media with high copying fidelity and low copying costs. 2.1.2.d. RepetitionA fourth way of achieving a low mutation rate in the vector form is to concentrate on making potential hosts understand the meme, not to ensure perfect copying fidelity (which may not be possible in some media, such as the spoken word). By repeated exposure, a potential host will not only recreate the meme from possibly distorted encodings, but also be more likely to become infected. This is an especially useful strategy for meme complexes, large memes and memes with high abstractability since they can (and often must) be transmitted piecemeal. 2.1.3. SurvivalThe meme has to be able to survive in the medium, and the medium itself has to survive. Memes that can be encoded in durable vectors such as books, great art or major myths can spread almost unchanged for millennia, while memes encoded in ephemeral vectors such as the spoken word have to spread from host to host quickly and are also more likely to mutate into new variants. 2.1.4. AbstractabilitySome memes can be encoded in a large variety of vectors, while others are fixed in a single medium. Canonical examples are funny stories, which can be spoken, acted, written or drawn, and graffiti, which is its own vector. A meme that can pass from one medium to another can spread more easily and change into forms more able to infect new hosts, but is of course more sensitive to mutations. One strategy that works well together with high abstractability is the understanding- repeated exposure strategy, since it decreases the mutation rate and partially relies on the abstractability of the meme. 2.1.5. DecodabilityFinally, a meme must ensure that its vector is possible to decode for new potential hosts. Most artificial media used for information and meme storage are intended to be easy to decode (Dawkins would say there is a memetic selection effect here: the