British scholar Susan Blackmore theorizes that the evolution of memes occurs outside of human beings' capacity to control it.

Courtesy Jolyon Troscianko MONTEREY, California – In the 1970s, Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" in his book The Selfish Gene to refer to aspects of human culture and how they evolve in a way that's analogous to how genes evolve. Since then, the study of memes has become an evolving meme itself.

A meme is an idea or thing that is passed from person to person and is either adopted for its usefulness or other purpose – in some cases becoming a wildly popular idea that can't be stopped – or abandoned to die a quick and ignoble death. A meme can be a song or snippet of a song, a dance, an urban legend, an expression or behavior, a product brand or even a religion.

British scholar Susan Blackmore, who delivered a presentation on memes at the TED conference Thursday morning, says that human beings are being overrun by memes that want to use us for their own advancement. Wired.com spoke with her at TED.

Wired: What's the difference between a meme and an ordinary idea or thing? Does an idea or thing have to be wildly popular and widely adopted to be a meme?

Susan Blackmore: Absolutely not. The whole idea of a meme is that it's information that is copied with variation and selection. So any idea that is copied from person to person is a meme. But an idea that you think up for yourself and is not expressed is not a meme. The emphasis has to be on copying, because that's what makes evolution possible. Lots of ideas are never copied at all. They just go to a couple people and then they fizzle out.

Wired: Do successful memes have certain qualities in common?

Blackmore: Yes. Lots succeed because they're good for us or they're true or beautiful or useful and we select them for those reasons. Some other memes succeed, in spite of not being beautiful or true or useful, by using tricks. So religions, for example, have some value, but by and large they're false ideas that use tricks to get into people's heads – threats of hell, promises of heaven, the allure of being a good person or of God loving you. There are also memes that trick you into thinking that you're going to get popular or that you're going to get rich or that you're going to get a bigger penis, whatever it is.

Wired: What about things that get rooted in popular culture despite an aversion to them and a desire for them to go away? For example, how is it possible that the Paris Hilton meme hasn't reached the end of its shelf life yet?

Blackmore: Presumably because it presses enough human buttons – you know, sex, greed, celebrity. Some memes will succeed because they make you talk about them even though you think they're bad. For example, a horrible story about murder or torture upsets you. And one of the ways you try to cope with the upset is to tell somebody else, to share the burden, and that way it spreads and upsets more people, even though you wish it wouldn't.

Wired: How big a role does the news media play in spreading a meme? And can the media kill a meme? I've noticed that often memes that take off on the internet reach their peak and jump the shark the moment they appear on CNN.

Blackmore: The (news) media has huge, huge power to spread a meme because it's the major mechanism of copying.

Memes are using human brains as their copying machinery. So we need to understand the way human beings work. A lot of us want to be the first with a great new fashion. Well, not the first because we might look (like) an idiot. We want to be the second or third, but we don't want to be the hundredth. So once something gets onto CNN, you know you've missed the exciting, I'm-up-there-with-the-trendy-stuff moment.

Wired: You refer to memes as an organism and talk about them as things we have no control over. Are we completely powerless against them?

Blackmore: Some of them we can control. But as more and more stuff comes our way, our control becomes less and less. You can in the early stages of a new meme drag it back and stop it. If you know that only two or three other people know something you can stop them from spreading it. Or if a book has been written, you can burn the paper that it's written on. But once a meme has been let loose in the population, you can't take it back.

What culture is doing, what the memesphere is doing, is taking a human being and infecting it with masses of new information and exploiting its tendencies. We are being turned from ordinary old-fashioned meme machines into what I call "teme" machines – machines for copying technological information, spreading photos and printed words and digital files.

We can choose to turn our computer off if we want to (stop from absorbing and spreading some memes). But we as a species are not in control of the internet. We are not in control of the growth of new media. And we are getting less and less able to control what goes on out there.

What I believe is happening now is that true teme machines are arriving – that is, machines that copy and produce variations and then select. That's what you need for an evolutionary process; that's natural selection.

Up until very recently in the world of memes, humans did all the varying and selecting. We had machines that copied – photocopiers, printing presses – but only very recently do we have artificial machines that also produce the variations, for example (software that) mixes up ideas and produces an essay or neural networks that produce new music and do the selecting. There are machines that will choose which music you listen to. It's all shifting that way because evolution by natural selection is inevitable. There's a shift to the machines doing all of that.

We're not there yet. But once we're there, there's going to be evolution of memes out there that is totally out of our control.

Wired: What will that look like?

Blackmore: Well, it will look like humans are just a minor thing on this planet with masses (of) silicon-based machinery using us to drag stuff out of the ground to build more machines.

We are so ego-centric. We think of ourselves as the center of the universe. We need to do a flip and see us as a player in a vast evolutionary process, which we're not in control of.

Wired: Why is the area of meme study controversial?

Blackmore: I can think of three reasons. One, people misunderstand it. They think memes are the same as ideas.

Two, they are frightened of it. Memetics appears to have a lot of implications that we humans are machines, which people have never liked. Of course we're machines, we're biological machines. But people don't like that. Free will and consciousness is an illusion, and the self is a complex of memes. People don't like that. My view is that if these things are true it doesn't matter if we like them or not.

The third possible reason is maybe it's a load of garbage. But we'll find that out if we do the science and make testable predictions and compare memetics with other theories about culture; we'll find out whether it's true.

Wired: Why is it important to study memes? What can we learn from the phenomenon?

Blackmore: We understand human evolution in a completely different way. We need to see what's going on in the world. The world is being taken over by the technological memes, and if we don't understand what's happening we are not going to be able to cope with it.

The stress on a human brain, the way our kids' brains are torn in 10 bits at once doing multitasking, the pressures to take drugs to stay awake so you can process more memes all day ... The stresses on the human brain are huge and we need to understand why and how.

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