Table of contents

Introduction

This material is compiled on the basis of a series of articles “@: Infornography” of the project “Loud Schola” and reflects the theoretical ideas about memetics developed by the project participants during its operation. The material is intended to give the reader a reference to start their own research in the design of memes.

Definitions:

A meme is a unit of information in consciousness, whose existence influences events in such a way that a large number of its copies arise in other consciousnesses. (Brodie's simplified definition)

Memagent - a functional component of a meme, causing any specific impact or complex of its effects on the carrier.

Memocomplex (memeplex) - A set of mutually supporting memes that co-evolve in symbiotic relationships. Religious and political dogmas, social movements, artistic styles, traditions and customs, paradigms, languages, etc. are meme complexes.

The life cycle of a media virus

When designing memes it is important to understand how they are arranged. Let's try to make some deconstruction in order to understand the basics of the anatomy of a media virus.

First of all, it should be understood that there are different types of memes. Dawkins argued that for memes, fertility and relative accuracy are important (as opposed to absolute accuracy for genes). Among the examples of memes he called melodies, ideas, buzzwords and expressions, methods of cooking soup or building arches, but also the concept of God and Darwin's theory. The latter examples, however, represent whole meme complexes, or memeplexes.

Memocomplexes also include subcultures, including the well-established quasi-subcultures of individual communities and discussion platforms, which have “its own atmosphere”. Such complexes in the aggregate reinforce each meme, creating in the minds of participants a certain set of triggers that facilitate the introduction of these memes, which contributes to the emergence in these communities of stable terminology and sometimes even media viruses.

Rashkoff called such media events as media viruses that cause real social change. It is clear that the media virus is different from the Internet meme by scale (social change!) and the distribution channel (media!).

Internet memes are kept here separately, with which the word meme is usually associated with the network, or the so-called “dank memes”. Unlike most memes, which are quite imperceptibly and relatively accurately replicated, dank memes are any short information (word or phrase, image, melody, etc.) that instantly and unexpectedly become fashionable and reproduced on the Internet, as a rule in new contexts or situations. Thus, for an Internet meme, the main role is played by popularity (which can be compared with the fecundity according to Dawkins), as well as communicative expansion. In this sense, neither Darwin's theory nor the recipe for soup are dank memes.

Dank-Meme does not seek exact reproduction, but rather, distortion, or at least new contexts in the broad sense of the word. Their appearance is often unexpected, and sometimes meaningless and absurd. The life of the dank-meme, especially at the beginning of his journey, is not routine, but, on the contrary, is constantly creative. And as will be shown later, such memes are highly valuable as attention attractors and for popularizing the triggers needed to spread more complex memetic concepts.

In the life cycle of a dank meme, there are four stages:

1. Creation of meme and initial reaction.

This happens in one place, on a website, forum or blog, where a strange, absurd, sometimes poetic phrase arises that provokes a lively discussion.

2. Spread of the meme.

Then the phrase moves to other sites, and begins to try new contexts and situations. I would call this period a creative zone, because the meme changes, trying to capture more communicative space. This is a time of communicative expansion.

3. Usage of the meme.

Then comes a period of stability - the most optional, but nonetheless important phase, because it leaves meme a choice (see clause 4). Meme loses energy, but by inertia continues to be used and thereby exist.

4. Fading of the meme or changing it's status.

It disappears because it ceases to be interesting, - fashion is always transient - or persists, but ceases to be a meme, enters the flesh of language or communication. And we don't even feel that it was a meme. Want an example? You are welcome. Smiley. Do not believe that this is a meme? Well, it only proves my point.

Consider the device dank memes at each stage separately:

1. Manifestation of meme.

The initial meme embryo can arise as a result of random data nymphormation (term will be described in "Nymphormation" chapter), like crossing several words and images, or in the context of some absurd situation or distortion of information about it, often with the appearance of an cacography. Someone came up with a new word to express their emotion in some situation or made a typo, then someone else picked up a suitable or unsuitable image, video sequence, melody, etc. for this word.

The main thing is to combine all these data, words, images, emotions, context, etc. worked as an replicator-agent, that is, it prompted the reader to repeatedly reproduce, causing an emotional response in the reward system in the brain.

Usually, a replicator is a kind of absurdity, weirdness, falling out of the usual number of replicas. The absurdity acts here as a kind of unusual, over which, moreover, you want to make fun, that is, to talk about it. Thus, the absurdity provokes something like discussion, parody, or at least repetition.

However, in the case of so-called “forced memes”, the replication process itself can act as a replicator. In this case, the meme itself may not attract much attention, but its creators deliberately repeat the meme many times, perhaps even creating several variations on their own to create an impression among readers that the meme is popular. In this case, the replicator will be the desire of people to be in a trend or to show belonging to the community where the meme was launched. This is something like an artificial auto-sync.

Thus, at this stage, the structure of the meme is simple: a clue (something that attracts attention) plus a replicator (the urge to copy), and also context and other load information is possible. During the life of a meme, its replicator will have to undergo three stages of evolution: absurdity (dissonance) - trend (expression of affiliation) - function (contextual use in speech). Forced memes begin immediately from the second stage.

1.2. Initial Expansion

After sufficient infection of the original site, a forum, board or blog, the preparation of a meme for informational expansion, distribution beyond the place of its appearance begins. A large number of meme mutations are created, it crossbreeds with other memes, different pictures, attempts to apply it in different contexts, until the most stable canonic context core is found and the number of its variations becomes large enough to spread around the network, scattering like spores they created the impression that the meme is already popular. An additional incentive in the reward system is created by the fact that by observing many variations of a meme, people recognize a common pattern in them, and the recognition of such causes a release of endorphins, such as successful recognition of facial expressions.

Furthermore, the meaning of the replicator gradually changes; in its capacity it’s not so much the desire to make fun of it as the desire to support the trend and show involvement to the memeplex of its community, spreading its culture outside and satisfying the need for socialization. A bunch of context and image in the meme core may already differ from the one that was laid at its first occurrence, since the canon reflects not so much the context of the meme as the most stable context of its use during the formation of the canon, the original meaning by this point may already be partially lost. Meme becomes a sign of elitism in some way, a sort of distinction, a symbol of the discussion platform.

Now, the popularity of the meme within the community is already supported by the meme complex, and new participants will be guided to a greater extent by what is “accepted here” and distribute the meme outside the community in order to show their involvement in it, even if they will do it unconsciously.

At this stage, a feeling of secondary absurdity may also arise, when the content of the meme is not the content of the meme, but the fact of its wide distribution and appearance in various media is absurd.

2. Spread.

At this stage, the fate of the meme will be determined by how versatile its replicator is and how many variations of it in different contexts the community has managed to create. Forced memes are universal, but they cannot spread far without constant artificial support, at least until they find the purpose as a symbol of a certain context, that is, they will become a well-established term for something.

Basically, the meme begins to acquire something like a bulbous structure: in the center there is an almost unchanged canonical core, outside a layer of additional information that changes randomly by crossbreeding the meme with everything. Or vice versa, a meme becomes a macro into which any information or other memes are embedded.

An example of the first are various photoshop collages, where a meme is applied to many different pictures. Due to the fact that the pictures may have different contexts, sometimes they will determine the penetration of a meme into some communities with relevant topics. As it spreads, the meme replicator, as well as in the original community, will increasingly exploit the desire of people to follow the trend, to show their awareness, perhaps even involving them in their primary memo complex.

Macros memes are a more advanced form, as they are not only more convenient for embedding external content, but also often embed other popular memes, spreading at their expense. Examples of macro memes are demotivators, blue brain memes or four-square comics, the filling of which can be completely arbitrary, but the pattern is always the same. Such memes are the most viable, as it is convenient for them to parasitize on other memes and they can easily exist even after the complete loss of the original meaning. Recently, cases of embedding other macros into such a macro and so on have often been noted.

It should be noted that during the transition to the trend phase, the Demotivators almost completely lost their original essence and became something of a fashionable frame for any content in general. Here the trend component turned out to be stronger than the semantic one.

Sometimes, as a macro, there can be not only a design pattern, but, for example, a plot sequence or something else more abstract.

There are also macros that not only contain the content, but also crossbreed it directly in the macro. Crossing macros with macros truly engenders a great variety of memetic abominations.

3. Meme usage and change of status.

At this stage, the meme has already spread fairly well on the network and has an established usage context. During this period, the meme is still shoved anywhere, but not with such rabid fanaticism as it was at first. Now, the fading charge of a meme is supported mainly by its crossing with new memes and attempts to apply it in new contexts.

Hybrids will briefly return to attention, but much weaker than the original peak.

However, with a sufficiently large concentration of memes in the datasphere, the emergence of radically new hybrids is possible, if the Meme was selected a fundamentally new context, discordant with the original one (which revives the element of absurdity), or little-known memes were crossed. In most cases, the signature image of a popular meme in the past would be such hybrids, due to the appearance of something like immunity or meme-allergy.

The further fate of the meme will depend primarily on its functionality. The meme replicator starts to change radically, often this leads to the disintegration of the canonical nucleus, its optimization for targeted use.

Meme is looking for a feature that can offer to persist as part of a language or communication.

Most often, such memes tend to become a container for transferring such types of data that cannot be transmitted directly to the network, for example, emotions, complexes of emotions that occur in certain situations, and a reference to a certain pattern of events. Meme can function further like an emoji-smiley or a popular expression. Macros can be used, but they completely lose the original essence, as a template of four frames for a comic book, few people know what content was originally placed in it.

4. Resurrection.

Memes that have not found their function in communication may sink into oblivion or hibernate for years. The same can happen with memes that are not widespread and have died out in the initial stages.

However, over time, when the immune response of memory to such memes completely disappears, they can accidentally get into a favorable memocomplex, acquire a new context there and generate a new wave of epidemic.

This happens when the content of 50 years ago becomes suddenly popular, or suddenly a meme comes into the trend, to which no one paid attention three years ago. This indicates that the external conditions of the information environment play a decisive role in the emergence of meme popularity.

Memeplexes and triggers

Usually, memocomplexes are created as systems of interconnected memes around a certain complex idea that has too much semantic scope for self-propagation as a meme. Individual fragments are separated from such an idea and converted into separate memes connected by a common concept and distributed references to each other.

It should be noted that the memocomplexes undergo the same developmental stages as single memes, however, it takes much more time and the life of the memo-complex in an unchanged condition directly depends on the degree of connectedness of memes in it and its canonicity (immunity). For example, subcultures can be considered as higher dank-memocomplexes, they appear as something unusual and attract attention, then lose their essence, degenerating into a fashionable trend and deconstructing to a set of images and attributes and eventually disappear, leaving behind a set of hybrids from crossing with other trends and subcultures.

However, the most important element of memetic infection is its ability to transfer and introduce triggers to groups of people within such memocomplexes that facilitate the perception of certain ideas and information. It is no secret that it is easier for people to perceive the theory of some ideas, if they are already familiar with the terminology. People are more likely to perceive familiar things.

Therefore, it makes sense to initially distribute key terminology with dank memes and memo complexes in order to prepare the target audience for the perception of your message.

In conclusion of this chapter I want to draw attention to the fact that the word meme, as it is most often used on the Internet, is a meme itself, but much more complex. It personifies the entire meme complex of dank memes and increasingly strengthens the trend for their production, prompts the development of new technologies in this area. Think about your device and prospects for development.

Psychoselectivity and auto-sync. Dormant memes.

Some memes can be in a “dormant” state for a long time and can be activated only under certain trends, when elements consonant with them take root in people's minds. Many popular viral memes gained their popularity a year later, or even three after they were created, and all this time they could be rather sluggish in social networks and forums by individual users, without causing a significant emotional response.

Such meme, even with a simple design, can be sharpened to interact with the whole system of triggers, that irrelevant at the time of its creation. Meme is awakened when the target audience develops a suitable model of perception and a figurative row. There are cases when memes hibernated for decades, waiting for the onset of favorable conditions for their reproduction.

Such memes can be aimed both at interaction with more complex memocomplexes, such as entire cultural trends or models of world perception, and on the psychological characteristics of specific people.

Selectivity can also manifest itself in primitive forms of viral memes, such as parasitic words, buzz words, depending on whether the carrier has a certain subcultural base of perception or psychological type.

Parasitic words with psychoselectivity, for example, can rely on the connection between the phonetics of a word and the most characteristic emotional state of a person. Thus, for example, psychologist Ralph Rummer proved that words in which sound dominates / i: / are more characteristic for positive emotions, while words with sound / o: / for negative ones. He also showed the opposite effect, consisting in the fact that the pronunciation of such words influenced the emotional state of a person.

In other words, the psychoselective word-parasite will look for a carrier with a suitable character and, through its repetition, maintain it in the desired emotional state, as well as induce a similar state in the audience.

More complex memes are based on many factors, the presence of certain figurative triggers in carriers, their disposition to the perception of various information patterns, etc.

An important feature is the ability of memes to influence a person’s emotions and perceptions at a deep level; however, for such influence to be significant, the concentration of meme carriers in a separate community must be at least about 5%. This figure is due to the auto-sync effect known in social engineering, or the “5% effect”. For the first time this phenomenon was observed in ancient Egypt. Its essence is as follows: if in some kind of community, 5% percent simultaneously perform a certain action, the rest of the majority begins to repeat.

If in a herd of horses grazing peacefully, scare 5% of individuals and “let them flee”, then the rest of the herd will be torn off; if even 5% of fireflies accidentally flash simultaneously, then a flash of a whole meadow will immediately occur. This feature is manifested in humans. What the experiment testifies to: people were invited to a large, spacious hall and they were given the task “to move as you please.” And some were given a clearly defined task - how exactly to move and when. Thus, it was experimentally confirmed that 5% of people moving with a specific goal can make all the multitude move in the same direction.

For auto-synchronization, it is necessary that a number of some objects have at least partially identical information-algorithmic state and are in conditions that allow information exchange between them - at least indiscriminate, circular. Therefore, until a threshold concentration is reached, the influence of memes is limited to individual impact, and upon reaching it, the synergistic effect of influence already begins to manifest itself on the community as a whole.

The well-known “meme-forcing” technique uses this principle; forcer, acting anonymously or with the participation of many nominees, creates the illusion of auto-synchronization for artificially activating the social effects of the meme. In the case of successful forcing, the actual number of meme carriers reaches a threshold value and the process becomes self-sustaining.

The Structure of Meme

Although many authors define a meme as a unit of cultural information, its composition can be relatively complex and include an extensive set of components at different levels of perception. Moreover, such components can be variously connected with each other and even with components of other memes, forming cluster structures and memeplexes inside the meme itself. Of course, it is impossible to bring all the memes under one structural pattern due to their almost limitless diversity, but according to the degree of awareness of the perception of such components, they can be divided into four levels: Iconic, Semantic, Meta-information and Archetypes. Consider them sequentially:

- The Iconic level contains the image in which the meme is transmitted outside of consciousness, that is, its name, picture or some other semiotic sign referring to the semantic part of the meme. That is exactly what we perceive by the senses.

- The semantic part contains our conscious understanding of the direct essence of the meme, the idea or concept behind it. What this meme refers to directly.

- Meta-information is a meme context, its interpretation, accompanying regularities that are not directly related to its meaning, or derived from it, but are its integral attributes. This is not information that follows from the semantics of the meme itself, but the result of its interaction with the cognitive process of the carrier. Here are all the memagents responsible for the effect of the meme on human behavior, modifying his thinking, as well as agents of memetic replication, prompting the spread of this meme, projections of the meme on current social trends and hidden promises. It also includes all the conclusions to which a person will inevitably come from the interaction with the meme, although they are not spelled out explicitly in its meaning. In fact, the meta-level is the construct that arises when a meme interacts with the cognitive process of its carrier. This is the result of the change of our inner thinking apparatus, the semantic part of the meme.

Let's take the road sign “road under construction” as an example: the picture itself that comes to mind when you mention it is the Iconic part, the semantic part is that road works are in the place where the sign was placed, and the meta part carries the conclusion that there is no need to go there.

- The archetypical part contains well-established patterns at the level of the unconscious, activated by the components of the conscious part of the meme. (see chapter “Archetypical Memagents”) These can be instinctive reactions, irrational emotions, caused by any observable images completely unconsciously, and other patterns that cannot be rationalized.

Each of the parts can be keypart, that is, form the basis of the meme core, or be absent from it altogether. For example, it is possible that the meme core does not contain a Iconic part at all. This does not mean the absence of representation, but only that it is variable to the extent that it reflects the semantics and meta information that make up the core. Such memes can be called abstract, this category includes behavioral algorithms, stereotypes, mental states. In fact, the meme core can make up any stable structural pattern.

Now we will consider some typical constructions:

The most common type of memes in communication is a compact, bright and recognizable Iconic part associated with a larger semantic one. This allows you to make the process of communication more efficiently, because in one word or manner you can express a rather complex idea, emotion, or refer to a certain situation without describing it in detail. The shorter the meme's Iconic sequence, the easier it is to ensure its replication goes without distortion of the components that make up its core. At the level of meta-information, such convenience serves as one of the prerequisites for the spread of a meme, along with the ability to show involvement in a particular community or its cultural awareness.

Among dank memes, the most popular Iconic part is a picture with text. As a kind of symbolic form, cacography memes can be noted, which are distorted words. During the period of their popularity in russian internet segment, the meta-basis of their wide distribution was, among other things, the desire to annoy people, sensitive to grammatical errors, although the motives for using cacography in general can be quite different.

Exceptions in terms of the proportions of the Iconic and Semantic components may be Void memes (see the chapter “Void Memes”), where the semantic part may be absent altogether, and the Iconic part is directly related to the meta level, for example, the motivation is to find the semantic meaning.

Also, Iconic part may exceed the semantic volume in the case of Infornographic memes, the concept of which for the most part is at the meta-level (It is common for Infornographic memes to overload perception with a super-dense flow of information at the Iconic level).

The evolution of the meme dictates the need for maximum optimization and conciseness of the iconic form, as the meme spreads and is embedded in the cultural context, its iconic form is often reduced to a sign referring to this context. In the case of text with pictures, the striving for optimization gradually supersedes the graphic part to the meta level, and only text remains in motion, often simplified. In other words, if a word causes approximately the same complex range of feelings as a long text, then why not replace this text with a word, and the word with a symbol?

This process can be traced most vividly by the example of an Advice-dog meme, the recognizable symbolic part of which was reduced to the @ symbol between two lines of text. The parts that make up the core of the meme remained unchanged, only their disposition changed, what was familiar and required replication in the beginning became meta-information, part of the propagation environment. The immediate consequence of this process is the emergence and existence of Abbreviations, the most compact iconic parts of the respective memes and memocomplexes.

A side effect of the disproportion between the iconic and semantic part and the tendency towards simplification can be the degradation of the semantic part of the meme. If the iconic part is compact and convenient for quick spreading, and the idea itself is voluminous, perceived with difficulty, or strongly tied to the sociocultural context of the meme's original distribution environment, the essence of the meme will be distorted and degenerate to the point that it may disappear altogether or be completely replaced with something fundamentally different during its cultural expansion. Therefore, it is not surprising that attempts to disseminate complex concepts through popular memes often reduce them to simple buzzwords for which nothing stands, or even, contrary to the initial message, there is an annoyance regarding the last social group that used them.

The key factor in the mechanism of this process is the transition to a different socio-cultural environment, in which only the iconic part of the meme is fully perceived, and the semantic or meta-part partially turns out to be empty because of the difference in the cultural background. Filling this void part is possible in two scenarios - either by borrowing the missing data from the meme distribution medium, while cultural expansion takes place accordingly, or, which is undesirable in most cases when memodesigning, by replacing the semantics with the closest association with the iconic part, including the random taken from the new environment. This effect should first be taken into account when designing, if at the meta level there is a message to infect the widest possible audience with a meme.

Archetypes are a very powerful component for memetic engineering, since they affect the perception of a meme more quickly than all its other components and, unlike meta-level agents, they are practically not amenable to deconstruction. In a sense, the archetypal component can be attributed to the meta-level, only a global, universal scale, bound not only to the environment, but rather to a biological species. Since archetypes are subconscious in nature, it is impossible to invest them directly into a meme. However, archetypes can be activated through their associated images in other parts of the meme. As a rule, references to archetypes are placed on the iconic level so that the reaction to them takes place as quickly and unambiguously as possible. This makes it possible to make it easier for meme to penetrate into the memory of a carrier, when in other cases you would have to place it on a meta level, for example, the auto-sync agent “everyone has already seen it, but you have not yet”.

To illustrate the above, an example is a smile or a laugh that is perceived in the same way, regardless of culture, race, gender, or nationality. At the same time, in other species, the grin of the teeth can already be perceived as a signal of aggression.

The most important feature of the archetype is its ability to extend its influence on the components of the semantic level. That is, if we place a reference to the archetype that causes anxiety at the iconic level, then the semantic part will be perceived as something disturbing. This principle is often and widely used in advertising. It is worth noting that the agent of striving for maximum expansion is present on the meta level of all dank memes and subordinates all the other components to it. That is why in the course of evolution they easily get rid of parts of their semantics or iconic sign, but the very desire to infect them all remains unchanged.

This feature leads to the fact that Dank memes, barely arising, immediately begin to interbreed with everything in a row and generate countless variations of themselves in different forms and contexts. At the same time, the iconic part of the meme is modified in every possible way in order to inculcate in it various elements and images that will facilitate the penetration of the meme into the largest possible number of multi-thematic sites and social groups. This is what makes Dank Memes so widespread. Eventually, they begin to interbreed at iconic level with other dank memes so that they drag them into their target audience. The strategy of “MemeJacking” is based on this principle, which is used by marketers who attach their content to existing memes in order to draw attention to it.

The most important result of the evolution of such processes was the emergence of macros-memes, initially involving the incorporation of other memes or memetic-active content. At the iconic level, this is a kind of template with empty spaces, where you need to place iconic sign content of other memes, and at the meta level, you add the need to create as many such variations as possible. Content can carry completely different functions and triggers, but the macro is always recognizable.

An example would be demotivators, comics of four pictures, patterned comics like “Breakfast Guy”, memes about blue brain, “Reaction guys”, etc. Not only can such memes be towed by an arbitrarily large number of other memes, the process of creating them is extremely simple and can be carried out automatically, which makes them most suitable for fast distribution on the Internet, and also contributed to the creation of a number of automatic online meme-generators operating based on such macros.

The last group of memes, which we consider in this article, is Communicative.

In contrast to macros, which are a cluster of different memes in the perception of one person, communicatives are a cluster of different interpretations of one meme in the minds of different people. Thus, it is obvious that communicatives can exist only where there are social interactions. These are memes at the level of collective consciousness.

The communicative principle of operation is that it obviously contains a component that refers to certain individual perceptual filters, which is why different groups of people will perceive this component differently. Moreover, its perception will generate opposite opinions or emotions. In other words, communicatives are memes, whose popularity is based on the conflict of their perception by different people.

This can include any topics that divide people into several groups with opposite opinions: political and ideological, physical (the plane on the conveyor belt where the bike will go), psychological, moral, and even all sorts of optical illusions: what is the of the dress, "which way the girl rotates" etc. Their popularity is ensured by the fact that different people may correspond to different patterns of perception that are mutually exclusive opposition to each other, and not only semantic or meta-information, but even archetypal (blue or yellow color, direction of rotation), which you can try to resolve only by going to communication.

More complex and extensive relationships between memes in social groups can generate memocomplexes, such as theories, doctrines, subcultures, religions, political trends and fashion trends, including whole sets of interconnected memes that create their integral recognizable image and principles of social interactions within them. Such formations often arise in separate social groups and discussion platforms and will be considered in more detail separately.

Archetypal Memagents

Evolutional Archetypes

The more diverse information around us, the stronger the mind fences off the wall, letting in only that which is in tune with the knowledge and interests that already exist in it. This is well demonstrated by the Baader-Meinhoff effect, when once you hear a word you begin to notice it everywhere. To overcome this barrier, many memes use an archetypal component that acts on a subconscious level. Its presence greatly speeds up the meme spreading process, reducing the incubation period required to reach the threshold number of carriers and activate the auto-sync effect.

It is worth noting that archetypes are not independent images or ideas, such as data that can be realized and transmitted to someone else. Rather, it is a composite pattern encoded in the neural network of the brain and carrying mostly emotional meta-information about abstract images that fall under this pattern. Thus, archetypes can be called “memes of the unconscious”, capable of being projected onto conscious information.

The simplest example is emoticons - semiotic signs, on which the archetype is stably projected, which is why these signs are strongly associated with a certain emotion.

These include, for example, emoticons. With one smiley, a person is able to involuntarily perceive or sense the emotion associated with it, faster than he is aware of the meaning of the sign itself. At the same time, the brain unconsciously recognizes in the emoticon archetypal facial features, the expression of which correlates with emotion and causes something like empathy. This property is often used by memes in order to consolidate them in communication, as a tool for expressing emotions. To do this, different characters are massively replicated with a number of hypertrophied emotional facial expressions. (trollface, okay guy, pepe the frog)

An important property of emoticon archetypes is their ability to associatively communicate with any other information, projecting to it a part of its effect. This effect is known and often used by advertisers, when a positive attitude to the product is formed due to the fact that it is associated with any archetypal symbols.

According to the study of Ralph Rumer, even individual sounds can act as emoticons, which makes it possible for all sorts of parasitic words to attack people with a certain emotional state, corresponding to the phonetics of these words and further to maintain this state.

According to its format, signs-archetypes can be not only hieroglyphic characters, but also iconic signs, which happens much more often. Some images can involve a whole complex of archetypes, leading them to complex internal interactions and generating specific effects. Due to the implicit semantic connection between the image and the reaction of the unconscious, we can classify them as void memagents of class F.

Consider a popular online image - a Cat.

According to ethologists, the archetypal fear of the predator, which for the apes was a cheetah, is buried on a deep subconscious level. This instinctive fear is not recognized as fear in general, but forces us to pay attention to everything that comes from cats, increased, disproportionate to their current role of pets.

Ancestors of people needed to see the cheetahs beautiful and graceful, so as not to take their eyes off them and study their movements and habits, increasing their chances of survival. Therefore, even a combination of black and yellow colors attracts attention, which is used in road signs.

Modern domesticated cats have also adapted to life with a person - the meowing of a cat asking for food or attention coincides in frequency and timbre with the cry of a small child, thus causing parental feelings towards the animal. This is clearly discordant with the “cheetah archetype”, the dissonance reinforces the fact that modern cats are safe compared to cheetahs.

As far as the probability of a mortal threat emanating from a cat, the price of a question of life or immediate death after a couple of fractions of a second is just as high, which, in addition, is reinforced by an inescapable dissonance of a sense of danger and a “child’s voice” - the combination of these unconscious contradictions creates but consistently replicable attention actualization.

Such combination of archetypes is a prerequisite for successful memetic engineering. Combinations of symptoms with the opposite emotional tone often work very well. For example, in the Middle Ages, the popular image on the margins of manuscripts was the image of the bloodthirsty rabbits Droleri, which combined signs of harmlessness and cruelty. Images of predatory rabbits and other herbivores appeared in culture many times.

Historical and folklore archetypes

In addition to genetically inherited, there are also archetypes acquired individually. Such archetypes, unlike evolutionary, can be transmitted through folklore at the level of meta-data. These include, for example, the behavioral role patterns of fairy-tale heroes, drawn in childhood from the relevant folklore and through a generalization of the characters in different tales. Such archetypes, according to Eric Berne, subconsciously influence the choice of people line of conduct throughout their lives.

You can also identify sacred symbols and elements of long-gone cultures. A person does not have access to their full cultural memocomplexes, as they existed in the distant past, however, they reconstruct their atmosphere from the totality of available historical data. At the same time, the older such data, the more reconstruction of their emotional part will be based on mythology, divorced from the real everyday life of the time, and the real information will be reduced to a set of dry historical facts, as a result, the archetypes for ancient symbols with the greatest sense of sacredness and magic are formed.

As in the case of the evolutionary archetypes of the cat-image , many images can generate composite meta-archetypes with complex effects. For this reason, for each cultural direction or activity, their subconscious archetypal images can be formed, most suitable for creating memes for this environment. For example, in many cyberpunk-style works one can come across the archetypal plot of a digitized mind leaving the physical body, which is generated by the projection of other, more ancient, perhaps even religious, archetypes on cyberpunk images.

Accordingly, if such an image is laid in a meme, it will be perceived in the target environment as something obviously familiar and perhaps to some extent, sacred or magical, which will facilitate its penetration into the memory of the carrier. For this reason, the identification of such images and features is extremely important for memetic engineering and at the moment there are several possible ways to do this:

1. Class E void-memes.

One of the most short-lived void-memes of class E is the Rorschach Stains. They represent a graphic image, completely devoid of its own semantic meaning, however, widely interpreted by the neural network of the brain, because of which various archetypal images of perception are projected onto it. In fact, today the Rorsharh stains are a memagent carrying the “free association method”. You can peer into such stains and notice what they look like and what emotions it causes. However, such a method reveals archetypes completely unsystematic and untargeted.

2. Psychedelic method

A prime example: the Ganzfeld effect, when images from the subconscious are extracted under conditions of sensory deprivation. This includes any non-standard conditions of brain functioning that allow subconscious images to penetrate the channel of conscious perception. However, how to process and investigate such information systemically is not clear.

3. Oneric method

The third path to the images of the subconscious mind is through dreams. The representatives of "Synthetical Science" group formulated the concept of the “City of Ideas”, which allows to separate some specific subconscious information from dreams. The concept is based on the fact that people living in cities often see in a dream a certain analogue of their city, but its cartography differs from the real one in some places.

Thus, the totality of all the differences between the dream city and the real one forms a so-called "The City of Ideas", consisting entirely of images and distortions generated by the subconscious.

Accordingly, if we collect a large enough statistical sample of such subconscious images and find among them those that are repeated among a large group of people, these will be the very archetypes.

Currently, online data can be found statistical surveys that dream most people in different regions of the country. It is noteworthy that fish and religious attributes are one of the most popular dream images.

4. Statistical method (Big data)

The most accurate data can be obtained through statistical analysis of social network data. In our case, the column “Interests” was analyzed, which is contained in the social network user profile according to the following algorithm:

In the beginning, two words are taken, the first is the target word, for which we are looking for associative data, the second is the control word, that is, any word popular among a wide range of users, like “auto” or “music”.

For each of the two words, a search query is made on the social network and lists of interests of all found users are read. For each unique interest, a “weight” is calculated, that is, the ratio of the number of users in whose interests it is found to the total number of users found in a given query.

Then the weights coinciding between the two samples of interests are compared. If the weights of some interest in both samples are approximately the same, then this is just a popular word, and we exclude it. If the interest in the target sample has a weight that exceeds the weight of the control one by 2-10 times, then this interest is most likely associated with the target word.

Thus, analyzing the lists of associated interests, one can find non-obvious links related to unconscious archetypes, as well as various characteristics of archetypal images.

Memeplexes. Meme propagation strategy.

The behavior of a meme is usually determined not only by its structure, but also by the information environment. We have already said that the penetration of memes into the consciousness and the dynamics of their distribution depend on a set of current trends and triggers. Moreover, all information is interrelated and forms a kind of network of intersecting data, or so-called. Memocomplex (or Memeplex).

Each meme one way or another refers to a whole range of different knowledge, images, meanings, the accessibility of which largely determines its behavior on a given information site. The simplest case is the compact memes with the simplest semantic part and archetypical signs in the Iconic part. These are the most popular dank memes. They spread the fastest, not only because they are compact and semantically simple, but also because they refer mostly to archetypes that are accessible to everyone. The archetypal memocomplex covers all of humanity, so such memes are not perceived as part of the memocomplex at all.

However, with an increase in the specificity of the semantic part, additional knowledge may be required for its understanding, the prevalence of which is limited. This can lead to the fact that the meme will not be assimilated outside the memeplex of this knowledge, it simply will not be understood, or if the semantic part is large enough, incomprehensible parts will fall off of it and will be replaced with something else that will lead to a meme mutation. For example, comic memes on a narrowly professional topic will be understood only by representatives of this profession, however if we read some general methodology from the same field, we will not understand only certain terms, many of which we will try to think out intuitively.

In this regard, memes most actively and with the most accurate replication are distributed inside the sites where they originated, and they mutate strongly, changing their appearance and meaning when they leave them, since the figurative integrity of their perception is violated. Dank memes were originally designed for such a process, since their main meta-idea is precisely the widest possible distribution, and the direct semantic content is secondary. Therefore, they actively mutate, trying themselves in all sorts of contexts and forms in order to spread the seeds of their memocomplex to as many informational sites as possible.

It should be noted that within the memocomplex of its site, memes are associated with a large number of references to various additional fragments of its own subculture, with which the meme is strongly synchronized. For this reason, even dank memes are used here with some canonicity, and their original semantics are carefully observed. It is this interconnectedness that ensures the accuracy of replication of memes in their native subcultures, and the need for identifying affiliation to them largely serves as a replicator here. Attempts of forcing a meme that are not sufficiently associated with other elements of the memocomplex within such communities will cause “meme-allergy” and rejection.

To quote Ari Spool, "Know Your Meme" expert: “The meme authors have a feeling of owning them, which they share with people who understand the joke. I think people just like humor, which seems directly related to them, and memes, even if they have spread very widely, usually continue to look like a “insider joke”, which everyone shares and in the creation process which they take part in.”

However, outside the native memocomplex, the effectiveness of the meme distribution will no longer depend on references to internal elements, but quite the contrary, the simplicity of semantics, the compactness of the iconic part and the presence of publicly available archetypes in it, as well as the simplicity of replication.

The real triumph in achieving the latter is the macros memes, which are a graphical template that requires minimal effort for its modification. Their creation is often automated by various online meme generators.

Speaking of the iconic part, the most popular combination is picture + text. This is due to the fact that in the graphic image it is easiest to place archetypal signs that attract attention, but in the process of optimization under the fastest possible quoting, the meme displaces the image from the iconic to semantic level, leaving only the text cacography, which will be used in speech after its popularity decrease.

(It is worth noting that it is cacography that are most popular for use in the text part, as in view of the uniqueness and recognition of their sound)

The standard time in which the life cycle of the bulk of Internet memes fits is one year, and the period of their explosive popularity rarely lasts more than a month. Moreover, when the use of a meme on the network reaches the auto-sync threshold, it acquires an additional replicator, encouraging people to distribute the meme to show their awareness, even if they do not know anything about its original meaning.

The situation with semantic-capacious concepts is more complicated. The variety of memes, of course, is not limited to compact media viruses sharpened for clip thinking; they can appear as memocomplexes of complex methodologies, philosophical paradigms, scientific theories, religious concepts and ideological doctrines.

Such semantically capacious memes will have a very voluminous semantic part with an insane amount of specific references and, as a rule, an extremely compact iconic expression like a name or symbol. It is obvious that such a structure is poorly located towards cultural expansion and is highly susceptible to disintegration due to partial misunderstanding and errors in transmission from one person to another. Therefore, several levels of centralization are created around the main iconic meme, on which memes are associated with it in the order of their tendency to expand. This determines the order of integration of memes in the complex into the consciousness of the carrier.

For the same reason, memeplexes with capacious semantics tend to create around themselves a protective shell of submemes, a secondary memocomplex built precisely around this very semantics. For this purpose, various fragments of the central concept are taken and on their basis separate, more compact memes are created that are firmly associated with it. Since these memes store copies of individual fragments of the basic paradigm, they do not allow it to change and mutate during expansion, and also facilitate its distribution in “portions”. Using geographic analogies, such sub-memes perform the functions of boundary pillars, delineating semantic territory with clear boundaries.

Thus, in addition to the central tradition, each traditional or cult memocomplex will include a number of myths that reinforce it, in turn, supported by vivid archetypal images. In scientific works such a connection is achieved by reference to the literature and the use of special terms (which also allows you to track the interaction of theories by the method of graphs).

The same complexes are subcultural and fashion trends, the basic trend of which is surrounded by a large amount of attributes that are canonically assigned to it. However, here semantics is often so ephemeral that it changes quite quickly under the influence of external conditions.

In an effort to preserve the integrity of the interrelationships of all elements of the memocomplex, its carriers tend to be conservative and experience discomfort when non-canonical modifications appear in it. At the same time, the distribution of individual submemes into the external information space facilitates the perception of the central meme, therefore the participants actively promote them.

In one of the texts of John Ohno was noted that if a person even glimpses and unconsciously observes different images and terms from a certain concept, its perception is given to him much easier.

(In his experiment, he displayed on the monitor subliminal messages with specific terminology of certain books, which greatly facilitated his subsequent study of these books. Also this phenomenon may be indirectly related to the Baader-Meinhoff effect.)

For this reason, it is worthwhile to distribute such fragments in the form of compact media viruses, not forgetting to leave them associated with the memocomplex, for example, at the expense of empty void memagents. You can create a MacGuffin, build chains of hidden clues involving a memocomplex, etc. Void agents will encourage carriers to look for additional information and collect the entire puzzle, learning the basic concept through sub-memes. To facilitate the perception of the theory is very useful to distribute images with infographics.

When creating memeplexes important thing is the collection of so-called Lidgen pipes (from words Lead Generation). So marketers call the totality of the contact data of people who have responded positively to the content and are its target audience. Such people are more likely to react positively to other similar content on this topic, and therefore its distribution will be more effective. Now this task is easily solved by groups in social networks.

Reproduction of memes

In this chapter we will talk about the two most important components of the memetic core, the agents responsible for meme reproduction. By the core of a meme, we mean that part of it that remains unchanged in all mutations of this particular meme. In the context of reproduction, the memetic core is characterized by a triad of recognizability-memorability-reproducibility. In other words, the carrier must first pay attention to the meme, then the meme should be deposited in its memory, and then encourage him to transmit the meme further. All these parameters together determine the nature, speed and ways in which the meme reproduces.

Recognition is for the most part a characteristic of the iconic part of the meme and determines how strongly the meme attracts attention. However, the process of recognition itself belongs to the meta-level, as the attention is focused by other memes and archetypes that are already in the carrier’s memory as tha parts of the single memeplex. In other words, the meme refers to some knowledge or images in memory, the remembering of which creates a positive stimulus that forces the carrier to pay attention to the meme. We will call this process a restimulation of memes in memory.

Memorability affects how well a meme is absorbed; for the most part, it determines how strongly it will be associated with the memplexes in the memory of the carrier. Recognizability and memorability is provided by penetration agents or integrators. In fact, integrators use the entire available arsenal of mnemotechnics, and to some extent expand it, having improved the memorization techniques in an evolutionary way.

Reproducibility is the responsibility of the meme transfer agent or the replicator, which creates an incentive to transfer the meme to other people. However, the complexity and volume of the meme's core will also significantly affect it, since it depends on them how much effort and time it will take to reproduce the key elements of the meme for its full transfer to the new carrier.

The integrator and the Replicator are integral elements of the meme core, which cause the carrier to first pay attention and read, then memorize, and finally distribute and transmit it to other people. For both of them, it is characteristic to refer to those archetypal or psychological constructs that can activate the reward system, in one case for “reading” the meme, and in the other for transferring the meme to a new carrier.

It will be most convenient to consider the structure of each of these agents on the example of Dank Memes, since their core often does not contain any side agents and is aimed solely at reproduction and expansion.

Despite the fact that Dank memes are considered an exclusive attribute of the Internet, they existed long before its appearance. Most similar to modern dank memes are sketches on the margins of medieval manuscripts (for example, droleri or marginalia, which were absurd collages that are not related to the text, one of the typical themes of which were bloodthirsty Easter killer rabbits). However, in the pre-digital era, information was more convenient to spread verbally, so the most common form of existence of such memes was anecdotes, sayings and proverbs.

With the advent of graphic editors and the Internet, the plot of such anecdotes became more effective to express in a compact image, and the text part was extremely reduced.

Nevertheless, the humoristic absurdity, elements of dissonance and the grotesque remained almost unchanged sign of Dank memes. They began to acquire the most viral nature on the Internet, when the idea that true absurdity lies not in the content of the meme, but in its wide distribution, for example, when the meme is started to be discussed in the television news, spread at the meta level. The positive stimulus was also complemented by the ability to demonstrate the power of the Internet community and its affiliation.

Integrators

In this chapter, we’ll talk about penetration agents or integrators that attract attention and memorize a meme. The simplest types of integrators use purely biological or archetypical mechanisms, for example, optical illusions, basic physiological stimuli (food, sex), or uniquely readable emotions to attract attention.

In conjunction, the recognition effect also works, which gives positive emotional reinforcement when a person recognizes a certain image, that is, the meme in some way coincides with the way it already exists in memory. In part, this effect is the cause of such high attention to various celebrities.

Recognition gives any meme a competitive advantage for the attention of potential carriers. An example of this is the Baader-Meinhoff effect (when once a word is heard, it is immediately noticed everywhere), which can also create the illusion of popularity of a meme, playing on a person’s desire to be aware of popular trends. In the same way, a meme that has already entered the memory can increase the recognition of memes associated with it and lead entire memocomplexes into the carrier’s mind.

Recognition always works in tandem with memorization, this inextricable link is due to the mechanisms of human memory, built on the principle of association. In the same way, integrators ensure the interaction of the meme with other elements of the memeplex. Being common elements for memes within the complex, they provide the necessary associative links during memorization and, accordingly, mutual synergistic activation of "friendly" memes, thus creating a favorable environment for each other.

For example, the prevalence of memetic cacographies is not accidental. They perfectly combine their uniqueness, which makes them recognizable, the absurdity that facilitates memorization - since they are distortions of familiar words, and the connection with the memocomplex of the language - the trigger for mentioning cacography can be its original analogue in everyday speech.

A rather ingenious way to increase the recognition effect is to use the replay effect. In this case, the meme itself injects images associated with it into memory, and then restimulates them, paying more and more attention to themselves. In fact, the repetition technique can be considered as the interaction of a meme with its own copy in short-term memory with the help of an integrator — with each repetition, recognition occurs, and, as a result, is fixed in memory. Forcing memes by repetition resorts to the same mechanism as bison - repetition provides memorability.

A particularly interesting application of the replay effect is the narrative, in which the “catch phrase” is repeated many times during the plot, evoking a positive emotional response with its recognizability, predictability, and some absurdity. With a sufficiently long repetition, a person will want to repeat it himself in order to artificially stimulate this effect, which makes such a phrase viral.

The rhyming effect or the Iten-Rosen phenomenon helps to increase memorability - this is a cognitive bias, due to which rhyming sayings and aphorisms seem to us more accurate and believable. It should be noted that rhyming, as well as absurdity are excellent catalysts for memorization, which is widely used in mnemonic.

The evolution of the agent of absurdity in dank memes went a separate way. Developing its ability to attract attention with the help of cognitive dissonance, it began to mutate into frank psychedelic, sometimes with a complete rejection of any more or less clear semantics, as well as using archetypal elements that attract attention, such as acid-bright complementary colors and optical illusions. Cognitive dissonance of such a level invariably encourages the carrier to share such experience with other people.

Replicators

Continuing on the theme of meme reproduction, we should take a look on replicators — agents that encourage the carrier to transfer the meme to other people.

They do this by acting on the reward system, engaging pleasure centers in making meme transfers. This happens through incentives based on two basic needs: the need for socialization, which means expanding and strengthening social relations, and the need to feel secure (securitization), which means protecting our social and mental territory.

Socialization will include incentives such as an emotional uplift from satisfying the need for communication, asserting one's own superiority and raising social status, manifesting one's views by repeating memes consonant with them, memes associated with epoch-making or absurd behavior that draw attention to their carrier and his ideas, motivating to a certain type of behavior close to the carriers and so on.

Forms of securisation are no less numerous - a sense of liberation from the impending threat or pressure (including mystical, as in the letters of happiness), compulsion, confirmation of their own achievements, qualifications and status (the feeling is “my life is better than in this picture”, “How clever I am" from understanding a complex meme) and so on.

The most common types of replicators are those that are based on the needs of people to demonstrate their community affiliation and awareness, as well as to strengthen communication within the community, or to expand it, to motivate community-accepted behavior and to oppress unacceptable. They are effectively used by both classical and dank memes and are the most fundamental to replicators of socialization.

Thus, various philosophical theses and references to their authors can be spread by people in order to emphasize their adherence to a certain flow of thought and their awareness in its theory. Similarly, the simplest memes like buzzwords, iconic elements of subcultures and other trends are distributed to demonstrate involvement in a certain social group and awareness of what is relevant there.

For this reason, the representatives of the site where these memes originated are most actively spreading them. The desire to transfer local memes to people outside the community is connected with the desire to expand the number of social relations or strengthen existing ones by increasing the number of “common interests”. The more people have common memes, the easier it is for them to communicate. That creates the so-called “Informational altruism”, when you constantly want to share the information with other people. The true motive for it is that others have a lot of common knowledge with the carrier, and they understand all of his references to them.

In an interesting way, the need for socialization uses memes of some imageboard cultures, which specifically focus on the low level of socialization of their followers, which further enhances their desire to spread the meme. So the replicator can strengthen itself by exaggerating the need for the motivation on which it works. Also, many of the security promise memeplexes will seek to convince you of the danger, so that this need is felt more acutely.

It is noticed that the need to express the belonging to a group also depends on the effect of the elitism of the community, which is inversely proportional to its size. Most actively, people tend to distribute local memes, but if there are few carriers, then the expansion will not be powerful enough. The need to demonstrate awareness is associated with the need to maintain its status in this social group. The archetypal feeling of collective power, on the contrary, is directly proportional to the size of the community, and as the number of carriers of a meme grows, it first complements and then becomes the main replication agent, replacing the sense of belonging to a group. Perhaps this is due to the existence of the effect of the “incubation period” among memes, when they remain local for a long time and then suddenly gain explosive popularity: during this period the number of carriers is too large to stand out, but not enough to activate the archetypical reproduction driver.

Often, this can be played by combining the cultural elements of the target group in the iconic part of the meme and giving the carrier an impression that everyone except him is already aware of this trend, or at least many. Meme forcing often occur on certain sites according to that scheme, it will be especially effective if this trend is supported by someone reputable in the target group. Also, you can make the meme relevant to the target group, but with some element of informational novelty, in order to use “informational altruism” within the community.

Socialization replicators are often supported by securitization replicators, for example, some memes illustrating minor specific situations from everyday life that people often pay attention to, but rarely discuss them with someone. Such memes create a stable “I am not the only one in this” signal in a person. The spread of the meme allows the carrier to confirm this thought, strengthening his self-confidence.

The Barnum effect works well for this agent - a general observation according to which people highly appreciate personality descriptions created, as they assume, especially for them, although in fact such characteristics are sufficiently generalized to be applicable to a wide circle of readers.

Another form of securitization can be deliberate stupidity, spreading which, people creating a contrast with their subjective intellectuality. This technique also synergistically uses absurdity, since dissonance exists inseparably from the act of relaying memes, therefore, encourages its spread.

An important incentive for securitization is also a sense of superiority. Memes help to reach its potential carrier through such techniques as pseudo-complexity, when a person feels clever because he could understand the weakly concealed meaning, as well as through watching someone else’s shame, against the background of which the person also feels joy that it didn't happened with him. The viral popularity of videos about all kinds of freaks in shameful situations is connected with this.

In the end, all the above-mentioned incentives are combined in various hybrid combinations, giving rise to dank memes with elements of irony, sarcasm and decadence, purposefully exaggerating the negative aspects of recognizable everyday realities, giving them a flattering or sarcastically opposite context to achieve dissonance. These kind of memes was especially spread on the network recently. Here you can see the elements of the absurd, and the recognition in an exaggeratedly disgusting form, allowing you to see your subjective reality more attractive, or highlight elements common to a social group, etc.

In conclusion, it is worth mentioning such type of replicator as “Viral events”.

Memes tied to current events quickly spread to the wave of news trends, which makes them an effective carrier of any embedded information, because it already implies a favorable environment, however, the lifetime of such memes is limited. Most often such memes are used in viral marketing.

Usually, a viral event has a very short duration. One of the strategies to use them is to respond quickly to news, the other is to wait for “planned” viral events, starting from holidays and ending with the end of the world. The end of the world is a universal example of a viral event, since its date is constantly updated after the previous one “played”, but it works every time equally well. It is important to bear in mind that whatever the hype, the relevance, and hence the effectiveness of the replication of the meme, is almost completely lost when the event or its planned date expires.

Despair Meme

Not always memes exist in the form of conscious ideas or images. Sometimes they can be persistent behavioral or emotional patterns with the property of replication. And as we will see from this chapter, sometimes such patterns can be destructive.

One of the significant factors influencing our world view and social relations are memes belonging to the Despair Meme (DM) class. Such memes are characterized by the presence of a meme agent with a very specific structure based on a semantic signal, carrying both discomfort and an insurmountable obstacle to its elimination. At the meta level, this signal modifies the cognitive cycle of adaptation to threats in such a way that it jams in the anxiety producing stage, where it infinitely produces a signal of the presence of danger, but does not receive encouragement from resisting it.

In an attempt to get such reward, by counteracting at least something, he begins to search for enemies or targets for dumping aggression in the environment and passes the meme to the following carrier, committing actions similar to those that have caused DM infection in himself. After the incubation period has passed, the meme is able to recreate its semantic signal on its own, maintaining its relevance for the carrier even if the external influence on him has ceased long ago.

By the mechanism of action, DM can be compared with psychoactive substances, where it would belong to neurotransmitter reuptake inhibitors that signal danger. Let's take a closer look at the diagram:

This diagram illustrates a normal threat adaptation cycle for a person. An irritant provokes a danger signal, which forces one to seek a solution, the finding of which creates a motivation that encourages action, which neutralizes the threat and triggers the reward system.

And this is how the cycle is modified by the impact of DM transactions, which are divided into two main types:

Type 1. The threat, the source of which can not be determined.

Type 2. A threat that cannot be neutralized without creating even greater danger.

In both cases, the consciousness signals the danger, but does not find a solution and only predicts the repetition of the danger in the future. As a result, the only way to emulate the end of a cycle for a while and get reward system activated is to transfer the DM to someone else in the form of a DM-transaction. However, this does not interrupt the cycle and the brain constantly signaling about the danger soon becomes tired and increases the level of cortisol, turning into an energy-saving mode, which is accompanied by apathy and depression.

In the final stage, the DM develops the ability to auto-stimulate, when the cycle is modified to such an extent that it can perceive anything as a threat. A state of paranoia arises and the carrier looks for signs of danger in everything, projecting the DM pattern onto any deviations in the surrounding world as onto Rorschach stains. Seeing anything unusual, he immediately thinks of it as a threat, which, due to its uncertainty, cannot withstand. So DM can continue to activate itself for years.

Summarizing the above, the infection of a person with DM will look like this: First, people who are infected with DM will act on a person, spreading information or creating situations containing the DM pattern.

A characteristic symptom in the early stages of infection is a pronounced oscillatory nature of the emotional state of the carrier: a person who is attacked by despair-meme will experience an alternation of emotional ups and downs, and the rises will become weaker each time until consistently depressed with occasional spikes of irritability and nervousness.

In this state, the carrier begins to actively disseminate negative information and emotions with the same structure as those that infected him with DM.

Autostimulation of DM makes the carrier suspicious of everything new and unusual.

Over time, the carrier begins to associate himself with all the characters of folklore who fails, and in general almost anything will remind him of the DM pattern and put him to a depressive or irritated state. There is an obsession that “everything is bad”. Paranoia and fear can also begin to develop regarding the threats that the DM carrier will invent without reason.

In such a nervous state, there is a greater need for securitization, and in order to feel safe from fictional enemies, the carrier will actively promote hostility towards them, infecting entire memeplexes with DM.

Prolonged exposure to DM subsequently causes an increased level of cortisol, which puts the brain in an energy-saving mode and makes it seek out reasons for refusing any constructive activity.

DM is most often transmitted through hidden transactions in communication, that is, at the level of meta-information.

These hidden transactions in the dialogue can be packaged both in direct aggression and in quite innocuous-looking statements, which, regardless of their content, are intended to cause an emotional decrease in the interlocutor, and this motive can be laid unconsciously. The ability to recognize them allows you to gradually develop immunity. Consider the most typical group of DM transactions:

1. Depreciation.

This type 1 DM is manifested in the fact that in response to any person’s story about their achievements, the meme carrier must say something that will make these achievements look insignificant or completely disastrous.

This may be a comparison with someone more successful, a negative outlook or a search for flaws, the main thing is that the hidden intention of the comment is to make the interviewee give up on his successes and feel the futility of his efforts. In the case of increased activity of the meme, even if no one talks about success, the carrier will, by inertia, strive to make the maximum number of critical and hostile comments and negatively respond to everything he hears.

2. Negative Retranslation.

Less directional, but very common DM of the first type.

It is expressed in the fact that the meme carrier seeks to retell and disseminate extremely bad and frightening news, or to distort neutral news, omitting positive moments and highlighting negative ones.

Such a transaction is designed to give others the impression that the world around is terrible and hostile, injustice reigns in it, and the carrier does not know where to send the frustration, because he cannot change this.

Sometimes the repeaters of bad news may even be outraged if their story does not cause resentment or concern to the interlocutor, even if he has nothing to do with this subject. As a result of saturation of the information background with bad news, a person constantly feels danger, the source of which is so far from his real competence that he cannot effectively oppose anything to it and feels helpless.

It is also worth noting that this way the despair-meme is most actively spread through the mass media, which exploit the property of the DM to attract the attention of those infected to such information.

A popular trick that the carrier's mind uses to distort information - excessive generalizations, for example, such as “Everyone says ...”, “It is believed that ...”, “Everyone is doing this”, etc. Thus, the victim cannot counterpose the counterargument to a non-existent source of the problem and is powerless. In such cases, to counter, it is enough to ask the speaker for clarification on which particular examples this statement is based.

Sometimes, in combination with the image of a popular threat, despair-memagent of this type may create an agent of paranoia, causing mass hysteria, leading to the formation of class I void-active memes.

3. Direct aggression with the induction of helplessness.

DM of the second type. Direct aggression, designed primarily to demonstrate to the victim his/her helplessness. At the same time, the aggressor is usually either disproportionately stronger than the victim or occupies a higher social position, which does not allow to resist him. For example, when a boss regularly shouts at a subordinate, he also begins to behave like that with his subordinates or family members.

4. Nagging.

The passive form of the second type DM, in which the carrier, being in a long-depressed state, needs to endlessly complain about everything, how bad everything is and how irreconcilable and hopeless it is. The purpose of the transaction is to cause the interlocutor emotional discomfort through empathy and decline any advice received, proving that it is impossible to correct the problem. An infected person will also refuse any help and insist on his hopelessness. This is exactly a completely unconstructive whining, the author of which is trying to prove that nothing can be done about it. In other words, the one who listens to this is forced to sympathize, but absolutely powerless to change something. In the absence of empathy, such a transaction would quickly collapse.

5. hyper-guardianship.

It usually happens on the part of parents who, in parallel, do everything for their children, and tirelessly tell them about which ones are dependent. Thus, they subconsciously seek to weaken them to increase their own value. As a rule, they cannot be repulsed because their intentions look good, and they themselves will never give up on them. However, in addition to parents, other people in different communities and situations can act this way.

6. Intolerant Conformism.

This type of DM is manifested in carriers of infected memeplexes, where a whole complex of social norms and beliefs begin to intensify their meme-allergic reactions with the help of DM. In such a situation, any deviation from the norms of memeplex causes a disproportionately high sense of threat and increased hostility.

This form of despair-meme is the most dangerous, as its carriers are able to join forces in their destructive strivings. Memo-allergic reactions are natural for memeplexes, but usually cause only hinder the assimilation of ideas harmful to memeplex, while DM increases the negative reaction a lot.

The principle, however, is the same, except that a person struck by an ordinary DM sees enemies in everyone around him, and those struck by a collective DM sees enemies in everyone who does not belong to their memocomplex, that is, looks, behaves or thinks differently.

The most vivid examples here are religious activists, radical ultra-conservatives and moral advocates, who mercilessly rush at anything that not fitting the rules by which they exist and seek to destroy it by all costs. In essence, any social pressure against something different is a manifestation of this form of DM.

DM-memeplexes and meme-allergies

Touching the despair-meme on the last chapter, we vividly illustrated that some of the patterns of the ideosphere surrounding us can carry a destructive impact.

Due to the fact that such memes often lack a fixed iconic or semantic part, and they are transmitted at the level of meta-information, the possibility of their conscious deconstruction is very difficult. A person does not realize that he is spreading a certain informational pattern; it looks to him as a natural behavior. Moreover, being in a team with a high percentage of DM carriers, people will consider it one of the norms of acceptable social interactions. Thus, despair-memes are not only widely distributed, but also embedded in many aspects of culture, forming at its meta-level their own memocomplexes, endowing culture with elements of dividing people to "friends" and "foes" and induction of irrational fears.

It is most convenient for DM to parasitize on the “immune system” of the memocomplexes, meme-repellers. Meme repeller is not a structural element of a meme or memeplex, but a generic name for the mechanism of suppressing meme-integrator agents that threaten the integrity of a memocomplex.

It happens this way: The external meme re-stimulates the memes associated with it in the memory of the carrier, trying to integrate into the memory, but comes into conflict with one or several memes that are also associated with them and belong to a stable memeplex.

Restimulation is one of the typical integrator tactics. Recalling the carrier of memes already familiar to him, the integrator releases all positive emotions associated with them and is thus associated with the benefits they bring. However, if an external meme tries to replace an existing one, it “calls into question” all memes related specifically to this targeted for replacement meme. In this case, the stimulation can be negative.

Attempting to replace existent memes poses the threat of losing the positive incentives that the memeplex gives the carrier. This leads to the fear of losing the corresponding benefits: Fear of Desocialization, Fear of losing status, Fear of destroying the ideological paradigm, etc. This is particularly pronounced if the “benefits” provided by the memplex consist in the weakening or anesthesia of basic fears. For example, religious memeplexes suppress the fear of death by the promise of an afterlife, or the fear of uncertainty, saying that there is some higher order.

If you try to replace at least one dogma, you will have to cast doubt on the entire memeplex, and this will mean that fears will no longer be suppressed. This will disturb the carrier and lead to the rejection of a new meme. You can call this phenomenon Mem-Allergies.

The same mechanism generates such feelings as remorse, unwillingness to question their beliefs, social pressure, etc.

As an example, in scientific paradigms, esoteric approaches will be strongly condemned, etc. Thus, memeplexes protect themselves from harmful mutations, decay, and crowding out by other memes. Religions and cults are the most resistant to mutations due to the fact that because of dogmatism, all of them are questioned in whole, not in parts, which means they give the strongest meme-allergies. However, if the components of the memeplex are assimilated by the carrier selectively and there is missing knowledge, their place may be taken by an outside memes that does not conflict with the existing ones.

In such cases, the memplex can mutate.

It follows that the most successful tactics of building an integrator of the meme will play up to as many components of the target memeplex as possible, positively stimulating them, and give a larger “benefit” than the meme it replaces, or try to occupy the empty space that arose when some components were lost during the transfer of memeplex to the new environment. For example, if a meme went beyond the group of people who created it, the new carrier will not know any subtleties or contexts from its background, the meme for them will turn into void-meme at some point, and its missing fragment will be filled with speculation or the first heard statement.

A good way to suppress basic fears can be their personification in the form of comic characters, these fears personifying. They often become later folklore archetypes.

DMs are joining meme-repellers, because the discomfort that arises at the time of their activation increases the need for securitization, namely, the replicator DM is based on.

They multiply negative impulses by looping on them, endlessly restimulating repellers and accumulating paranoia and frustration, which is why the carrier is forced to look where to throw out this frustration. Traditional memocomplexes infected with DMs are characterized by high conformity and a hostile condemnation of any behavior that does not fit into this complex. If, in a regular memocomplex, carriers experiencing mild discomfort from a violation of connectedness of ideas, when one of the memes is used “uncanonically”, then in an DM infected memocomplex, this discomfort will develop into a phobia. There will be a characteristic DM division into friends and foes, and “aliens” will threaten the memocomplex with the mere fact of their existence. In other words, the concept of an “enemy” is taking root, from which the memocomplex must be constantly defended.

Where the DM is embedded in a traditional or cultural memocomplex, its aggressive and radical form arises. Here is all kinds of inquisitors, ultra-conservative supporters of repressive measures, fanatical activists and fighters against something, etc. Partially acquired memeplexes are the most susceptible to infection, whose carriers are poorly versed in their original essence.

Moreover, it is the characteristic DM component of the paranoid-panic that makes carriers justify any measures to protect the “canons”, which makes the distribution of such complexes more dynamic, and their evolution, on the contrary, complicates.

DM-Infected complexes of an ideological nature can also impose a perception of any activity that is not justified within these complexes, as a sign of stupidity and inferiority. If your activity does not follow the “ideals” of the memocomplex, in the community of carriers of this form of memeplex you may be considered a freak.

Constant presence in the society affected by such memes creates a reflexive fear of social disapproval. This becomes a weighty reason for not doing anything unusual, not dressing strangely, not standing out so as not to look stupid, not to develop undertakings that are not justified within the framework of a common ideology.

The invariance of behavior becomes the main negative factor in the influence of such memocomplex on the mind of the carrier, for they practically do not evolve or do it very slowly, slowing down the progress of society as a whole and acting as a brake on any constructive activity. A counterweight for them at the global level is the progressive modernist memocomplexes arising during the periods of scientific and technical revolutions.

At the individual level, one can resist one’s own invariance by questioning all the internal constraints and frameworks, and most importantly, value judgments.

If you notice that you have made an assessment of the expediency of an action or familiarization with any content automatically, this may be a reason to think and analyze the background of your decision more carefully. Does they have signs of DM in themselves and whether they rely on archaic patterns in the manner of “as it should be” or “what others think.” Also, when evaluating people or events, it is worth asking: "Is this my personal opinion, or public opinion?" And if you decide to defend some kind of belief system, study it thoroughly on the basis of primary sources.

On this path, however, there is one significant trap, which is actively exploited by another type of DM-memocomplexes characteristic to destructive cults and sects. Its noticeable feature is the crossing of despair-meme with the principle of deconstruction described above.

Such cults take some kind of "counterproductive" pattern of thinking and present it as the source of all evils. Because of this evaluative interpretation, a person begins to seek out the presence of this factor in all his motives and soon discovers that all his thoughts and wills are to some extent dictated by this “defect” of thinking. As a result, critical thinking is paralyzed, free will and own opinion as such are lost.

Demonization of DMs can also become an instrument of self-destruction, since DMs are wedged in one form or another into all areas of thought, therefore it is not recommended to tune in to the complete rejection of all forms of this meme. Moreover, the demonization of something is already a manifestation of the DM.

From our point of view, one of the most successful approaches to the deconstruction of their own motives are the ideas of Discordianism, created as the parody religion of Kerry Thornley and Gregory Hill in 1963. Its basic concept is to not take anything seriously.

So, analyzing your motivations is useful in moderation, not trying to get rid of something completely.

Void-memes

Another interesting type of memes is ones built with the participation of semantic voidness. Such memes, as a rule, attract attention to themselves with hidden innuendo, the absence of the part of the semantic content in their structure that the mind seeks to fill.

Meme exploits the desire of the mind for holistic knowledge, pushing it to search for the missing fragments of this knowledge, which makes such memes able to control the attention of a person, prompting him to follow informational routes that were designed and sometimes create completely new content in an attempt to fill the information gap.

The most important feature of Void memes is their special motivation control mechanism, through which they draw attention to themselves. The ability of Void memes to induce motivation is almost limitless. At the meta-level, this mechanism modifies the question-action-response cycle so that the question remains open as long as possible, and the intended answer to it seems as attractive as possible. Take a look at the the scheme:

The semantic part of a Void meme usually contains a certain information gap, a demonstrative incompleteness, and the interpretation of this construct always gives the impression that this gap can be filled, and the missing information can be found by delving into the corresponding memeplex or performing other actions aimed at obtaining the missing information. The result of the perception of such pattern is always an open question.

In case when the required information exists, but is scattered within the memeplex, the carrier will have to make some effort and get an answer or another piece of it, enticing the carrier to absorb even more of the components of the memlex in order to put the puzzle together. In this case, the carrier will perceive the information less critically, as he has spent an effort to obtain it and wants to believe that it was not in vain.

At the same time, the longer the information remains inaccessible, the more consciousness tries to imagine what it could be. And the less we know about the missing piece of knowledge, the higher the expectations will be. The mind draws fantastic pictures in the imagination that triggers the reward system and provokes the production of dopamine, which is responsible for motivation. If the required information does not exist at all, the process can continue indefinitely until the carrier or group of carriers comes up with a reasonably convincing version that becomes generally accepted. Sometimes from such theories around the missing content of the void meme grows a whole new memplex.

In other words, the meme creates motivation from overstated expectations, which are the higher, the less we know about the missing information, and the need to justify the efforts spent on its search reduces the criticality of perception and skepticism. This contributes both to the assimilation of all the components of the memeplex and its distribution.

In the case when information is unavailable for a long time or does not exist, the motivation for its search becomes so high that the mind directs increased attention to everything that can somehow fill the void or confirm the invented hypotheses. This condition resembles the Ganzfeld effect, when sensory deprivation produces hallucinatory images. In this case, the mind tries to notice things that are usually ignored and look for patterns of connections between them, as well as extracting meaning from the associative rows or areas of the unconscious that sometimes creates a rather mystical perception of reality.

In this section, we will look at examples of the use of void memagents in memeplexes.

Examples and classification of void memes.

The classic example of a void meme is the notion of “Sepulki” from the books of S. Lem. When trying to find out the meaning of this word in the dictionary, the protagonist found only references to other words that referred to the word Sepulki, but everyone around used this word and the inability to figure out its meaning became practically the main plot quest of the protagonist.

The same properties are possessed by words disguised as hapax legomenon, that is, a word that is found in a language so rarely that its meaning is problematic to establish. Such a meme can be put into use by means of artificial propagation and can be a word that means nothing, but is confidently used in some indefinite context.

The practical significance of such memes is that at any time you can create a page in the network with its definition and it will have one hundred percent relevance in the search results and all users interested in it are guaranteed to get on this page.

However, with a long walk of such a term without a definition, it can acquire meaning on its own.

Also to this type of void memes can be attributed "Voynich's Manuscript", which is something like a large hapax legomenon and arousing in people an irresistible need to decipher it.

It also follows from the above that any item on which there is little information on the network can perform a similar function, even if there is no semantic emptiness in it. It is enough to create your own materials with its description, supplemented or distorted in a certain way, and then draw attention to this subject. Due to the small number of sources of information available, it will be taken on faith by the majority of those interested.

One of the experiments illustrating the properties of void memagents was conducted by a group of researchers who named the local meme they created [redacted]. The essence of the experiment was that this group was actively spreading a certain symbol in a single territory, which had no meaningful content. The authors of the meme point out that soon, the people who observed the symbol first showed interest, and later began to paint the symbol themselves on the walls. Thus, the viral nature of the meme was shown in its pure form. On the further development of the experiment from the authors have not been reported.

Another valuable type of void memes is MacGuffin (MacGuffin). McGuffin is something that really does not exist, but which creates the illusion of extraordinary value. It is the the ultimate goal of the quest. Usually used as a plot element in cinema, as well as in ARG. Non-existent objects, books, films, death files, etc. may be McGuffin.

In the core project of the SynSci group, Silent House was such as the state that a person achieves, having gone through the path of informational “rebirth”, and later was distorted and turned into a kind of bottom-end Internet. A distinctive feature of such memes is that they provoke people to search for the object that they personify, although there is no evidence that this object exists, and sometimes even an understanding of why it is needed.

The practical application of McGuffins is to draw attention to certain topics, as well as to generate interest around the content that is planned to be published in the future.

In the case of Silent House, McGuffin was used to engage people in the ARG process, which implies an independent search for related content. Thus, driven by the void memagents, people independently found and, guided by clues and rumors, voluntarily perceived ideas whose simple narrative presentation would definitely lead to their deconstruction.

Void memexes can be divided into three basic groups according to their structure, the nature of the void memagents and the method of its use:

Quasi-empty - memeplexes, in which information is redistributed in such a way that the first meme received by the carrier contains an information gap, but in total there is no such gap in the memeplex. That is, the assimilation of the entire memlex will fully answer the question it has induced. Such a memeplex supports understatement, until it is fully integrated into the memory of the carrier.

True Void - memeplexes or individual memes with a missing piece of information that does not exist completely and which cannot be objectively replenished. Such memeplexes remain incomplete throughout lifetime and use it to motivate the carrier to develop and distribute memeplex.

Void-active - may not contain semantic gap at all, but create it when interacting with other information or at the time of interpretation. Such memeplexes are generally toxic to other memeplexes or autotoxic. In the first case, the memeplex destroys the information of another memeplex, making it a void-meme and thus attracting attention to itself. In the second case, the meme destroys itself and deliberately reduces its population, drawing much attention to this process and thus making its limited circulation very desirable for the curious.

For convenience of research, the following classification of empty memes is proposed:

] Quasi-empty:

˚ Class A (Ambivalent) – An object, phenomenon, word, or image with an obscure or dual property / value that prompts to clarify or think out the meaning. Emptiness attracts attention, but is easily filled by the associated element of the memplex. Examples are euphemisms, the use of words in an uncharacteristic meaning, incorrect translation of words. The void area is the meaning of the message.

˚ Class B (Broken) –Intentionally fragmented information for the purpose of references to sources. When searching for the missing piece of information in memeplex, the carrier will find only its fragments, which are also void-memes that attracting attention to the following fragments. However, having collected them all, the carrier will receive holistic knowledge.

Examples of use are ARG, numbered diary pages or audio chronicles in literature and computer games. Void area - the amount of information, indication of the incompleteness of the message.

˚ Class C (Coded) – Hidden or encrypted information of a specific, understandable purpose. Information cannot be interpreted without additional memeplex components. Attracts attention by inaccessibility. The subjective importance of information increases due to the effort expended.

Examples are encrypted messages, text in a foreign language. The void area is a way to encode a message.

] True Void:

˚ Class D (Delirium) – Words or images denoting a non-existent object, and provoking certain associative images or reflex actions.

A special case is McGuffin, empty images, provoking the desire to possess them. Often the lack of information about the object is accompanied by meta-information about its high value. The area of voidness - the reliability of the message, the existence of an object that is described by the information.

˚ Class E (Empty) - Information in the form of images, symbols or any other representation with missing content (lack of meaning), creating the illusion of importance, the presence of content contextually, associatively or by the fact of its existence.

This may include hapax legomenon, “Sepulki”, non-existent words, Rorschach stains, and any other symbols and data arrays, the meaning of which is missing or can not be determined. The void area is both the object being described and the coding method However, there is no meta information about the language, the origin of the data, etc.

˚ Class F (Frightening) - Information causing the illusion of associative connection with some object or phenomenon, or unconsciously prompting to a specific action, in other words - causing an unconscious reaction or emotional states. Often has an 