Memetics

In a conversation with my Thesis Writing instructor, Mark Stafford, I was able to understand how my thesis is closely related to the concepts of memetics and meme behavior. I believe I’m developing a “topological model of meme activity”, even if until now I was somehow oblivious to it. I was too much concentrated in the idea of a word-of-mouth behavior, an expression used by Malcolm Gladwell in “The Tipping Point” and by Duncan Watts in “Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age”. Meme is truly the concept I’m facing when tracking chunks of information among a certain online social community, and by visually mapping these information patterns over time, I’m in fact building a “topological model of meme activity”. Here’s a daunting definition of meme, from Wikipedia:

“A meme (comes from memetic and memory) is a unit of information that replicates from brains or retention systems, such as books, to other brains or retention systems. In more specific terms, a meme is a self-propagating unit of cultural evolution, analogous to the gene (the unit of genetics). (…) Memes can represent parts of ideas, languages, tunes, designs, skills, moral and aesthetic values and anything else that is commonly learned and passed on to others as a unit. The study of evolutionary models of information transfer is called memetics.”

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition of a meme:

"An idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture."

The term meme originated in 1976 on Richard Dawkins’s notorious book “The Selfish Gene”.