"Never Underestimate The Power Of Memes"
In 1976, evolutionnary biologist Richard Dawkins published his book 'The Selfish Gene'. Dawkins' name for the unit of replication and selection in the ideosphere -the ideosphere's counterpart to the biosphere gene - is meme.
As a library is an organized collection of books, so a memory is an organized collection of memes. And the soup in which memes grow and flourish - the analogue to the 'primordial soup' out of which life first oozed - is the soup of human culture.
Exemple of memes are songs, tunes, ideas, catch phrases, clothes, fashion, ways of building or transforming analog synthesizers, ideas for patching and so on.
Just 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.
Memes, like genes, are susceptible to variation or distortion - the analogue for mutation. Various mutations of a meme will have to compete with each other, as well as with other memes, for attention -which is to say for brain ressources in term of both space and time devoted to that meme.
Psychologist N.K.Humphrey believes that memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.When you plant a fertile meme in somebody's mind, you literally parasitize his/her brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the same way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.
'The Midwestern Electronic Music Ensemble "or M.E.M.E.
Also, read Grant Richter's manifesto on e-music and memetics.
