The Truth About Memetics

For this Squidoo page, I'm focusing on the direct application, the core of what you need to know to use the principles in our book to empower you most efficiently. I'll also be offering the spread sheets I use in social media optimization and various ghostblogging-related tasks, and showing how all these different elements can link together to create an integrated marketing approach to web 2 & 3.0.

It's no surprise that we should create externally a system that is already in place internally. "Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets." wrote William S. Burroughs in the 1950's, and today the internet is fast becoming nothing BUT web 2.0 widgets, gadgets, plug-ins, phone apps, and socnets... We've hit mass density on externalizing ourselves with the internet as it already is, and it's only getting more densely interconnected. Understanding how to navigate the internet effectively requires the same skill set neurolinguistic professionals have developed to navigate internal psychic components, and that sociologists develop to process cultural and subcultural spheres. Everyone carries an opinion, or a belief, or a concern with them to any decision they may make, and challenging that, changing that requires models that can engineer around belief - the art of persuasion is crucial to packaging memes. A dynamic approach to memetics in today's online world requires as much of a grasp of copywriting as it does epidemiological models tempered with a long-term SEO strategy and the financial support to produce consistent and branded content. Currently, wikipedia states: "Memetics is a neo-Darwinian approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme. Starting from a metaphor used in the writings of Richard Dawkins, it has since turned into a new area of study, one that looks at the self-replicating units of culture. It has been proposed that just as memes are analogous to genes, memetics is analogous to genetics." Memetics then is not really so much an academic, qualitative theory, but a metaphorical or philosophical model. This leads the memeticist to take an artistic rather than a technical approach, and is where Edward E. Wilson and I started when we took on the challenge of co-authoring 'The Art of Memetics' and it has helped us establish an approach to social marketing that is systematic and scalable. This document represents the essence of that approach, and provides a starting point for both internal self-evaluation of one's memetic identity and an expression of that identity or other brand message across a social network.

Memetics is an artform centered around distributing memes across any given memetic network. As these networks exist both internally and externally, a memeticist is dealing in a practical way with a number of seemingly unrelated disciplines. At the center of this overlap lies cybernetic theory, but it also entails strategies from marketing, psychology, social networking, cultural analysis, rhetorical principles, and biological theory, specifically viral and epidemiological models. We cover this in depth in the book, and you can read it for free (or buy a copy) here.

The question, to a memeticist, isn't if we're carrying memes, or where we've picked them up, but how we consciously select the ones which are most beneficial to our growth and the growth of our culture. SmartMeme has an excellent page here for community organizers and social groups, and the savvy artist and marketer can learn a lot from here as well. But it's not just about the message, you have to plan for how that message is processed, which means studying decision-making in action. Understanding how we make decisions, and how beliefs can embed action before conscious thought is a great place for you to start journaling on these ideas you may already have conceived while reading this Squidoo page, and which provide context to the rest of this page:

If you have ever signed up for an email newsletter, you are essentially opening yourself up for impersonal mass communication. Obviously. And very very few newsletters aren't monetized in some way. And while they differ vastly in terms of their effectiveness in relation to the monetization, they all seek to direct your attention. The memetic ecosphere is directly analogous to the concept of cyberspace. A virtual space is created when the nodes of a communication network have memory. While it is intermittent in time and space, it's discontinuity is filled in the act of communication: it exists by virtue of transmission. The same nodal memory pattern that allows cyberspace to exist holds for human social networks. The memory exists at the nodes, individual people, and the interactions they engage in form the connections that define the network. Thus there is a cyberspace that exists entirely on the hardware of human brains and personal social interaction. This biological cyberspace is the memespace. If we have a space then it is no stretch to conceive of bodies capable of moving within that space. These bodies are ideas, or memes. Survival is persistence in memory.

The first steps then must be to increase our understanding of how these systems work. We must examine how we are connected to them, what our inputs and outputs are. We need to look at how we transform or affect the signal. We need to watch the signals move through the system and see how they transform as they make their way back to us. For the most part, we live in a world constructed by language. What and how we see the world is tied directly to how we describe it. In many ways, the fact that the English language has divided the noun and the verb does the English speaker a great disservice. Nowhere is there a noun not participating in a process, nor a verb not embodied in physical matter. Our descriptions limit how we move through space and the possibilities we can imagine in relation to the manipulation of objects. The spell of noun-language has convinced us that change is difficult, that things must remain as we have labeled them. Because of this, it's important to remain doubly aware of feedback that is not based in a language set, as it will accelerate your ability to adapt your signal outputs into the social network.

When branding (in the marketing, rather than scarification sense) is at its best, it represents an ongoing relationship between producer and consumer. It is a narrative of which the consumer is the star, the main character. Marketers work with branding techniques to help consumers use the product as a part of the bricolage process of building their identity, and conversely the marketer works to make the consumer more and more a part of the brand's overall story. They sink the meme of the brand in through common emotional triggers that tell part of the story, leaving a gap that the consumer can only close by taking action. When the circuit closes the story continues layering in emotional triggers in response to the way that the consumer has participated. A brand narrative never provides a complete experience, nor a complete representation of the narrative, so it can draw in participants to the brand experience. In this sense, branding is a cool medium.

When working through a model of "meme as brand", it becomes all the more important to consider the question 'What need does the meme fulfill?" A more exact question could be, "What is the emotional reward of incorporating the meme into your behavior set?" An interesting facet of human behavior is that we don't react emotionally to a situation, but rather we react to the meaning we have attached to the given situation.

A useful understanding is that there are many subsystems or circuits within the overall system of the world. There are many paths that a signal can take through these circuits either serially or concurrently. The reactions to or transformations of our actions along these multiple pathways can either reinforce each other and increase the effects of our signals or conflict and decrease the effects. The greater the scope of our understanding the greater our ability to release signals that will be reinforces by more and larger subsystems and the greater the effect our actions can have on the world.

Knowing how to strike this balance requires a different approach than the traditional advertising avenues - it requires a memetic artist.

The standard overarching strategy in social platforms include building up a friend base, sharing via recommendations on social network bookmarking sites, creating events and notifying these lists via the networking sites and email newsletters, creating proprietary widgets or applications for profiles or mobile devices, and building an underlying brand myth or storyline for the profiles, a context for the reader to approach the material.

If that material is going to be more than simply text and graphics, then that creates new opportunities for presenting the media on the various social platforms and increases the percentage of traffic (as well as increases the average length of a page visit), however there are two primary concerns with video and audio/podcasting content, the first being quality. The quality of both content and production must remain consistent from concept through to post-production. Branding of each show must be unique enough to be instantly recognizable. The video and podcasting world is already choked with "channels" vying for the limited resource of people's time meaning something not done well is not worth doing.

Secondly, the production regularity; realistic production schedules must be made, and they must be kept. Results from these efforts are not instantaneous. It is only through regular production of content that people will take notice, and only after encountering it so many times are they likely to take notice enough that their attention turns into a purchase of any kind. Provided these two terms can be met, the benefit of digital content is that (bandwidth aside) it costs nothing to duplicate and propagate across a deep network of sites. Part of the growth strategy for all free digital content is cross-promotion, with each new piece of media being a potential for a different demographic overlap.

Podcasts, be they audio or video, are carriers of the brand message themselves, rather than being conduits or platforms for advertisers. All media content, from trailers and podcasts to on-demand movies, should be available to the user in portable forms, which can be provided through secondary services (such as iTunes) as well as directly on their portable devices. As much as possible such content should be tagged, leading the user back to the website for more.

Good marketing tells you what you didn't know about a product that you may very well be interested in, and the product itself should deliver on the promises implicit in the advertisement. Good social marketing invites you back, and makes it easy for you to share the message with others, involving not just immediate customers, but also effective repeaters of your core brand message. If the internet is an extension of one's nervous system, then we're all sharing a portion of our neural networks. Memetics is the approach of applying all of the above to deeply root one's brand into an ongoing cultural discourse.

For further research and information about this topic, read The Art of Memetics

"In order to understand man's different and often contradictory ideologies we need to explore their deeper roots, analyzing ideas. We do not comprehend the nature of ideas and yet we use and oppose them, realizing that they are wonderful and dangerous entities whose action is comparable to that of drugs. They depress or stimulate the organism, leading men toward great deeds or toward individual and collective disaster. Ideas interfere with the autonomic mechanisms of the body, and are also projected into the social world, creating machines, institutions, methods and goals. Notwithstanding, we usually pay little attention to this tool, creator of all other tools and root of human activity."

- Rafael Rodriguez Delgado

Your subconscious needs precise goals, it takes you literally, and those goals need to be upgraded on a regular basis. Once a meme is accepted by your subconscious you will continue to have that meme influencing you until it is altered or changed deliberately. When a meme is dissolved from your subconscious you will no longer have the result of that meme present in your life. Your subconscious acts on the dominant memetic structures and those structures are put into place through repetition. The subconscious mind doesn't seem to be differentiated by the passage of time. What you believe determines what you imagine, and your imagination is the tool that allows you to detect synchronicity that can open up new experiences. Previous experiences are repeated unless the imagination is properly engaged. Once engaged, new memes require an incubation time to properly unfold and become dominant, during which time problem solving and goal achievement is subconsciously calculated.

The process of programming the subconscious is very straightforward and easily accomplished: begin by specifying all the details of the goal in clear and unambiguous language. The best results will come from clearly believable attainable goals which elicit a strong emotional reaction. The end results should be clearly visualized, and creating a tangible representation of this end result to be a focus for visualization is incredibly useful. Daily vuisualization that resolves around having the goal (as opposed to needing the goal) creates a resonance with the subconscious mind and events that will unfold to the desired result. Over time the visualization should be made more and more immediate, through sigilization techniques. During visualization, isolate and identify limiting beliefs or memes that interfere with the stated goal. This will help establish confidence toward the goal, which can be further reinforced by positive affirmations and celebration of accomplishments that move you toward the goals. All identity construction is in a social context. You don't really have an identity without some form of community formation, and it is against this social network that your identity intersects others.

Encountering and enduring stress together in a modality is a way to create a bond between people, and it works as long as both/all participants are in the same modality. be that a job, a virtual space, a teleconference, any stress, encountered and surmounted forms a bond socially through that modality. Being a capable communicator through a stressful environment, or calm guide to a stressful topic, can significantly increase one's marketing approach to distributing information or media across a social network.

If memes exist in the cyberspace of our collective minds, can remain dormant, or replicate independently of any one individual then we should look at the hardware that runs this cyberspace. We live awash in memetic content, both from internal psychic networks and externally through media outlets. We are exposed to multiple contradictory memes on every facet of our behavior, from religion and politics to genre-specific trivial beliefs (star wars vs. star trek). Yet we are largely unaware of the instructions we have received, and additionally we have the conscious experience of making a decision up to a half second after we already started taking an action. If we want to understand why we do one thing rather than another we have to look at how the machine of our body, nervous system, and cultural network works.

That which is not mediated has no existence in mediasphere. In other words, media has a life outside of its commodity frame, and mass production interfaces with folkways as pop culture. In the same way, that which is not named in one's psyche exists only as potential (or blocked potential).

To put this another way, a memetic network is the network along which a meme travels. This network can be a collusion between individuals exchanging memetic contents, or it can be a internal psychic event played out between the two hemispheres of the brain. A memetic network crosses the boundary between internal and external, and is a different axis than that of social behaviors or psychic events, an axis that sees both of these sets as part of a greater whole.

Just as we visualize the internet as a cyberspace constructed out of the memory at the nodes and the lines of communication between them we visualize the memetic ecosphere as a mental space based on the human beings and the lines of communication between them. The internet is just one communication platform for this network. As long as a person holds a meme in their memory it is in the meme's interest that that person continue existing preferably healthily enough to continue retransmitting the meme to other hosts. Then it behooves us to look at the survival pressures on the host organisms, the people.

In contemporary society that means looking at the socioeconomic system that people are embedded in. To the degree that contravening the norms endangers the host's survivability or reduces their communicational effectiveness it is against the interests of the memes to promote such behavior, and decidedly in the interests of the meme to monetize and promote acceptable behavior. The magic word is monetize, and in the memetics for money crowd, or infomarketing, monetization for its own sake is very common.

Infomarketing seeks to monetize every interaction the marketer has with the prospect online through some sort of profit-maximizing strategy. This monetization has become mainstream. With Google incorporating adsense into blogger, and with Amazon now providing contextual linking for their affiliates, creating a web presence that's heavily monetized is simple at the most basic level. This affiliate marketing system has sprung up from the edges of network marketing strategy and has become a part of the way that the internet itself is structured. There are a couple primary reasons for this.

First, network marketing by its very nature generates tracking data. Research is so important in an attention economy that supermarkets provide discounts to the shoppers who willingly provide the store with their shopping habits, for example. And in the online world, where a few tweaks one way or another can skyrocket the response rate of "click-through to conversions", tracking and research IS the game.

Secondly, affiliate marketing has a huge benefit for the producer of the product. The producer simply makes it known, via a resource like Click-Bank, that they're willing to pay anyone who can sell their product. The salesperson, the affiliate marketer, only gets paid if they complete a transaction, and the producer pays only out of the profits generated by the sale. Salespeople invest themselves into spreading the message, effectively becoming the medium. Memes incline the host organism to actions that further the meme's survival in some manner. Sometimes the actions increase replication, communication over networks, sometimes they increase the memes longevity, persistence in memory, and many times the actions the meme encourages adjust these two primary factors indirectly.

Memetics is intrinsically socially embedded as it relies on the communication and social behaviors of the human species. While we are generally only conscious of messages that are delivered linearly via some specific linguistic pattern, our nervous system also absorbs messages of associational or juxtapositional natures. However, there is no reason to assume memetics requires language to operate, as observed actions can also communicate. Performing an action plants the idea of performing and action in the minds of observers. In order to survive and spread memes need communication between potential hosts and a way to interact with the host organism's motivational systems. For non-linguistic or behavioural memes a relation to pleasure and or pain would be most effective. For linguistic memes emotional appeals are likely the best method.

Because memetic entities exist across persons it is possible they could form a group mind. To steal and idea Deleuze stole from Spinoza a body is defined by what it can do. When a large population of people choose to vote a certain way because of a shared belief, that can be said to be the action of that belief system and memetic entity. In an attention economy, having a list of people who are interested in reading what you write, of learning what you have to teach, or in voting for you come an election, might be the most personal way to take charge of one's own reputation. The richest people in the attention economy are, by definition, those who can direct the most attention.

Growing out an email list is possibly the most lucrative thing that could happen to an author. It goes beyond simply having a readership out there, because that immediacy of information transfer is a power once only available through the top-down distribution. The ability of the individual to create their own fans, their own marketing, their own specializations outside the traditional media network is the new American Dream. It's more than that, though, as the network truly is global, and the attention economy quite obviously ignores any nationalistic borders, butting up only against language barriers and cultural differences.