Thursday, January 7, 2010

2010 is the year of the meme










[this post is a translation of the post originally written by Fukutopika.]


It's 2010. Mankind has entered a new era.
2009 was a year where social media, Web 2.0's essence, have spread significantly.

Based on a social function, Twitter, blogs, bookmark-sharing, video sharing, Tumblr and Flickr, all of them have become truly social media.

"Social" is just an objective adjective for a subjective service where the user wants to have a good time sharing stuff with the peers.

But I have a question.
When you add "social" to "media", wouldn't it make media even more able to propagate?
In fact, a "social media" is a media that is highly distributed, right?
It is as if an inorganic substance was able to reproduce itself and propagate everywhere.
In other words, that constitutes a meme.

When you look back at the post whose title is "An attempt to define a meme in simple terms", written by "Professor" PASKALAMONIK, you realize that a social media matches all the characteristics of a meme.
Let's imagine a piece of Information PI. PI is transmitted from a brain to another brain, then undergoes some mutation. If PI is trivial, then it's highly likely to get eliminated by selection.
Conversely, an "attractive" information will survive and spread.

Of course, the definition of "attractive" depends on each person.
A person that likes unique things, a person that likes popular things, a person that likes limited-time products, a person that likes glasses-wearing males, all those folks have a different taste.

Anyway, the important thing here is not only to note that the information as a meme is reproducing itself inside the social media, but also to note that the medium itself (also called a platform) as a substrate bearing that information was reproducing itself.
It is as if the gene was spreading while at the same time the corresponding substrate, the human body was covering the planet entirely.
After joining Ameblo, Shokotan's popularity made a huge leap. Why? Because Shokotan is "giza" cute ("giza" meaning "very" was a term coined by Shokotan and constitutes in itself a powerful meme)
I believe that those social media are not only social, they have also a behaviour close to the behaviour of a meme.

Right. From this year, 2010, let's use the term of Meme-Media.
Also, through the evangelism of Bunkersofism, I predict that the word "meme" will be mainstream this year.
2010 is the year of the meme, i am telling you folks.

2 comments:

  1. It's interesting to think about memes from a marketing perspective.
    For anyone who wants to build a successful website or web service, it might be wise to consider its 'stickiness', or its potential to persist or evaporate depending on the idea's strength.

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  2. YES.
    But the problem is there is no recipe (yet) that tells you how to build a powerful meme based on the following 3 features:
    - heredity: must be stable, must have a set of permanent features:
    - longevity; must be independent from the era where it was born...
    - fecundity: must be easy to understand by a lot of brains.

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