MEMES
by Howard Rheingold

[note: This piece from _BRAINSTORMS: Ideas, Opinions, and
Speculations from the Mind of Howard Rheingold_ was identified by
Howard as a "free flow" piece meaning that readers are encouraged
to copy it and pass it along ... with attribution of course.]

Memes are units of meaning that leap from mind to mind - little semantic passengers that ride words and music and symbols and make themselves at home in your thoughts. They can travel via any communication medium from anthems to prayer books. This newsletter is a means of delivering memes from my mind to yours. The definition of memes is itself a meme, known as "the meme about memes." It has just colonized your cortex.

My monthly meme salvos are intended to be the friendliest kind of mental invasion. I think about each person on my mailing list when I label, stuff, and stamp each envelope, and smile when I fantasize about the ways each package of memes might affect your perspective. When I send a batch of BRAINSTORMS off in the mail, in my mind's eye I see a couple hundred minds across the country who will soon be enriched by a meme or two, and I fancy that I can feel your attentional energy flowing directly back to me for a few days after each mailing. And better yet, I know that key memes are flying beyond my reader's minds, to affect the people you encounter in your life and work.

Spreading memes effectively is one of the things I aim to do in my professional life. I also believe that meme-sharing is an important mission on this planet at this time. If anything is going to help steer us through the scary complexities of the near future, it is going to be the right memes, moving through the most efficient channels, to the right people at the right time. Technologies - from alphabets to printing presses to computer conferencing systems - have boosted the efficiency with which memes can circulate through populations and propagate from generation to generation. But the potency of the memes themselves derives from human thought, not the technology we use to spread them around.

I seem to be a vector for the meme about memes. My next book (published in March '88), _They Have A Word For It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases has a chapter on "Strange Memes." And the editor of my other
forthcoming book, _Excursions To The Far Side of the Mind_, decided to subtitle it: _A Book of Memes_.

The term was invented by Richard Dawkins, a sociobiologist, and "the meme about memes" is beginning to spread through the culture. Memes have two kinds of power. They can influence people to act - like religious or patriotic memes. And they can have some quality that makes people remember and repeat them. In the Winter, 1987 issue of WHOLE EARTH REVIEW, along with assorted Rheingoldiana, is an article by Keith Henson on "Memetics: The Science of Information Viruses." Henson calls his proposed science of memetics "germ theory applied to ideas," and points out that memes can be negative or positive. (Both the golden rule and racism are memes.) Henson claims that "most memes, like most microorganisms are either helpful or at least harmless."

We all need to spread the word about memes, and spread the meme that psychologists, semanticists, poets, sociologists ought to work together to build a science of memetics. Henson contends, and I agree, that understanding memes and the peculiar power they have over human behavior is a key task for social scientists during the rest of this century. (For a glimpse of important and fascinating research into the mystery and dynamics of cooperative behavior see the book _The Evolution of Cooperation_ by Robert Axelrod.) The continuing survival of our civilization probably depends on how well the memes for toleration, cooperation, and awareness of interdependence compete with all the other memes floating around the noosphere. Do your part. Copy this newsletter and pass it around. [transcribers note: I'm doing *my* part, Howard! ]

******************************************************

from Richard Dawkins, _The Selfish Gene_

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases,
clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building
arches. Jest as genes propagate themselves in the
gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or
eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool
by leaping from brain to brain 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. As my colleague N.K.
Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this
chapter: "...memes should be regarded as living
structures, not just metaphorically but technically.
When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you
literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a
vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way
that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of
a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -
the meme for, say, 'belief in life after death' is
actually realized physically, millions of times over,
as a structure in the nervous systems of individual
men the world over."

*******************************************************

New Meme Vectors Emerge:

Desktop publishing and computer conferencing have shifted memeform evolution into high gear. But the transmission of memes was already deeply embedded in our culture. For example, the advertising industry and demographers are trying to transport specific memes to certain hosts. Today's demographers talk about the fragmentation of mass-markets and the emergence of "hypersegmented" markets. What that means is that knowing *who* to communicate with , and *how* to catch their attention is becoming more valuable.

Newsletters are a form of hypersegmented communication - the audience for BRAINSTORMS consists of those minds Howard Rheingold selects for meme-colonization. And it is a one-to-many form of communication - I don't receive a couple hundred newsletters in return.

There are other ways of spreading memes - some of them new, and some of them downright historical.

How about a newsletter that instructs readers to duplicate the newsletter, including the duplication instruction, and pass along copies? It's called a FREE-FLOW. I'm declaring this issue a BRAINSTORMS FREE-FLOW.

Better yet, how about a group newsletter that is composed and distributed among a small number of individuals who are interested in discussing some subject or another? This use of the mail to create a kind of paper conferencing system goes back to the Committees of Correspondence who debated issues among themselves before the American Revolution. This form of many-to-many communication is making a comeback. I just read a fascinating handbook on _Letter Groups_ by Ann Weiser, who describes how to start a many-to-many group communication system for less than a dollar a month per member. You and your friends agree to send one page per month (or whatever you decide among you) to the "organizing editor," who photocopies the pages and mails them out. Everybody puts a few bucks in the kitty to get it started and the organizing editor keeps track of funds. _Letter Groups_ is available from The Public Interest Media Project, P.O. Box 14066, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 19123.

Let a thousand memeforms bloom!

------
editor's note: _BRAINSTORMS: Ideas, Opinions, and Speculations from the Mind of Howard Rheingold_ is something special. He desktop publishes it and sends it to friends, colleagues, and people in his network. (He'll probably send you a copy if you ask him. His address is 306 Poplar, Mill Valley, CA 94941) Howard is the author of a whole bunch of neat books: TOOLS FOR THOUGHT (Prentice-Hall, 1986), COGNITIVE CONNECTION (Prentice-Hall, 1987), HIGHER CREATIVITY (Tarcher, 1984), THEY HAVE A WORD FOR IT: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases, and EXCURSIONS TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE MIND: A Book of Memes. He can be found online on The Well.