Memes from 'Infectious' Bloggers & Twitters

The way that certain images, videos or concepts can suddenly spread like wildfire across the web, using email and social websites to propagate, is one of online culture's most unique phenomena.

Now Spanish researchers claim to have found a way to accurately predict how quickly and widely new "memes", as they are called, will spread. The ability to forecast this "viral" behaviour would be of great interest to sociologists and marketeers, among others.

The secret, they say, is to recognise the fact that people vary in how "infectious" they are when it comes to sharing content online. While some people pass on things they receive right away, others do so after some delay, or not at all.

Medical models
The viral spread of information online has conventionally been modelled using epidemiological tools developed to analyse the spread of biological viruses.

One of the concepts borrowed is that of an infection's R₀, or basic reproductive number, which describes how many other people someone with the virus can be expected to infect. Knowing the R₀ number help predict the likelihood and extent of real life epidemics, such as H1N1 swine flu.

Rememebr that models that apply the idea to online information can only indicate whether an internet meme is likely to be successful or to die out quickly, says Esteban Moro at the Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain.

Moro, working with José Luis Iribarren at IBM in Madrid, used IBM's company email newsletter to show the importance of variations between people's infectiousness in propagating memes online.

Memes: Replace Genes as Engine driving Human Evolution

The idea of memes as a cultural analogue of genes has been much maligned, and most biologists still reject it. Yet memetics has much to offer in explaining human nature.

MemeTheory
According to meme theory, humans are radically different from all other species because we alone are meme machines.

Human intelligence is not just a bit more or a bit better than other kinds of intelligence, it is something completely different, based on a new evolutionary process and a new kind of information.

Differentiating
The main difference between conventional theories and memetics is this: most biologists assume that culture and language evolved because they helped humans survive and pass on their genes, and that genes retain ultimate control.

Memetics challenges that assumption. Although the capacity for imitation must once have been adaptive for the apes who started it, evolution has no foresight and could not have predicted the consequences of letting loose a new evolutionary process. Nor could it have retained control of memes once they began evolving in their own right.

Proliferation
So memes began to proliferate. What began as an adaptation soon became like a parasite - a new evolving entity that changed the apes and their world forever. Once memes were proliferating, individuals benefited from copying the latest and most successful ones, and then passed on any genes that helped them do so.

Memetic Drive
This "memetic drive" forced their brains to get bigger and bigger, and to become adept at copying the most successful memes, eventually leading to language, art, music, ritual and religion - the successful designs of human culture.

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