For awhile I’ve been seeing the word “meme” used in a way which, while perhaps not strictly inaccurate, falls far short of the full impact of the concept which the word is intended to evoke.
You may know what I mean; in blogging, such things as “name your five favorite albums, and call on x other people to do the same…” will be called a meme. This is fun, nothing wrong with that at all; but to my mind, it only barely qualifies for the term meme. In the sense that yes, it is technically viral, and will spread around.
A meme is traditionally not simply a little list like that; it’s an idea. Not just any idea, but an idea that takes on a life of it’s own; it’s an idea that is viral, or self-replicating. Students of memetics (yes, there is such a thing) would refer to Christianity as a meme. I don’t think that this necessarily takes away from the reality of the Gospel (as I see it, at least) — calling the Gospel a meme is simply making the observation that it was an idea which spread in a way in which other ideas did not, to the point that two thousand years later, it is still spreading; last I heard Pentecostalism (which is only one part of what we would call “Christendom”) was one of the fastest growing religious groups in the world.
Many fads and styles, such as Gladwell writes about in his Tipping Point, are basically memes.
Web 2.0 is a meme; more than a style, a technology, or a feature set, “web 2.0″ is an idea. It is the idea that there is something new happening on the platform we call the world wide web, which was not happening before. You could go a lot further than that, but that seems to be where agreement as to what “web 2.0″ is or is not starts to break down. The basic kernel of the idea is maintained across the board, though: whatever web 2.0 is, evidently it is new and exciting.
The concept of a meme is very powerful. It is analogous to that holy grail of marketing: word of mouth. Not just any word of mouth, but fanatical customer evangelism. It’s a lot like what Seth Godin called the IdeaVirus.
I can see this concept being, more and more, a central one in the converging worlds of advertising, marketing, product evangelism, and business, especially online. When you have people writing blogs about corporations–like Google, Starbucks, or Microsoft–or about products (Linux, Firefox, etc.), not because they are being paid, but simply because they want to…
I’m not in the advertising field, but from what I hear, some of this is already changing the way marketing is done. Companies are starting blogs on purpose, understanding (or, at least, pretending to understand) that this will connect with their audience better than Michael Jordan in a commercial during the superbowl. (Though that’s not a bad idea, either; keep that in mind.)
You might also find the wikipedia entry on this topic interesting. The concept of the meme is fascinating, and worth thinking about (you could say that the concept of the meme is, itself, a meme); it’s certainly much more than a simple internet “chain letter.”
