Hey, thanks for th' link, Paragon.  I've heard of memes before, but had never quite sorted out in my head what they were.  But now I know...I love th' idea!  It's itching t' be a made a story....

More than funky...it's grooooovy...

Heh.  It depresses me sometimes t' think that no matter what I think, say, do...someone's done it before.

Oooo! I am a genius! I knew something like that was possible, now just watch as I take over the world.

What a cool idea - it fascinates me the way that ideas travel around and infect people.  I suppose that translates into urban legends and those nasty joke virus warning emails.

Hmm, if you consider memes like a disease, then the internet and bulletin boards in particular are the open sewers of the modern world.  It makes infection that much faster and harder to control.

It would be interesting to consider why some ideas prompted people to spread the word and others didn't, or weren't so successful.  Ah, if I could have my time at university again, I'd do linguistics and communications and so on.

Binky wrote:

I suppose that translates into urban legends and those nasty joke virus warning emails.

Precisely - The really expensive cookie thing, the Budweiser Frog screensaver thing, all the fake virus warnings fall into a little-known category of computer viruses known as memetic viruses.  They're not actually real viruses, of course, but they do propogate themselves very well.

Dani
::fading back into lurkdom::

Ooooh Snowcrash.. I love that book! I read it last summer, and I was so fascinated by the concepts in it that I actually ended up taking a class related to linguistics when I got back to school. I think I saw someone mention this in another thread somewhere, that there are a lot of similarities in concepts between that book and Otherland... That made reading it even more interesting to me, because I could compare the way the two authors treated the themes. 

By the way, there is this website - Memepool - that basically has a bunch of random links to weird stuff posted every day, thus contributing to the spread of both interesting and pointless ideas.

[ April 18, 2002: Message edited by: Aquadawn ]

merriam webster online defines meme as "an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture"

so far, that's my favorite definition because it emphasizes that calling these things memes is just a different way of recognizing things that we've known were there for a long, long time. every other definition i've seen goes into big long explanations, but this covers it all concisely. i suppose that's why it's a dictionary definition.

if you're interested in learning more, here are a few websites to go to:

as paragon linked above, principia cybernetica

Journal of Memetics: Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, which is sponsored in part by the principia cybernetica project. so you don't have to click on the link on the main page that takes you to the index of all the articles they've published, i'll give it to you here.

this here page seems to be chalk full of links. i suspect many of them are worthwhile.

and where not devoted to memetics (although there is a memetics section), i found this list of links to be full of lots of fun stuff. (i think there are some overlaps between these pages, but i really haven't taken the time to check)

I shall try and remember to look it up in my copy of Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable when I get home tonight.

I'll see if it's in Brewers dictionary of phrase and fable when I get home tonight

Yeah, the server has been freaky lately. Reporting errors when there are none. I had the same problem but ignored it and discovered the post was there after all.

yalahii.

Server thumped, and SMTP errors corrected.  Let me know if problems persist.