More about memes…

While searching for information about memes on the Internet, I’ve found some advices to get an interesting and attractive meme as the result of a competition started by the site “HazRuido.com”.

Summarizing some of the points given by this webpage, we can say that a good meme needs a topic able to capture the attention because of its peculiarity. In this way, the receiver will send it to his friends or partners.

Another important thing is thinking about the profile of the person who is going to receive the meme. (They are usually young and single men). The use of the web as much as the mail can help to attract the interest of the Internet users, if we succeed in obtaining the attention of the public opinion leaders. And finally, we have to profit the traditional resources to get a topic for our memes.

Nowadays, there are different types of memes according to their objectives:

• Self-promotion: They are focused on promoting a person, product or company.
• Advertising and marketing: they are focused on public relations, advertising, and they are used to create interest and positive criticism for a product among the public.
• Hoaxes: They spread urban rumours for example…
• Others.

In my opinion, they are getting more and more important in the social networking area and among big companies which consider them as a source for their business.

By Elena P.

Memes

Surely you have received some e-mail asking you to fill a number of fields on aspects about you (your name, your favourite color, if you have ever been in love and so on) and forward it to your contacts, so that they’ll receive your answers and will have to do the same. That’s a meme. But, of course, all memes aren’t like that.

Acording to the Oxford English Dictionary:

A meme /mi:m/ is an element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation.

So, any kind of information that is copied from person to person, and likely to be modified and selected, is a meme, just like the cultural brother of a gene. This term was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. Memetics, the science related with memes, declares that our cultures are the constantly evolving product of natural selection of memes. For example, another types of memes would be fashion or urban legends.

Susan Blackmore, whose bio and work is worth reading, is interested in this topic and she sees Internet as “a vast realm of memes, growing rapidly by the process of memetic evolution and not under human control“. I cannot disagree with her, Internet being such a great net of passing information. Lately, it is very common to see memes travelling through the blogsphere, such as “your five weird habits” or “your 25 favourite films ever”.

Some ‘self-declared’ memes are quite unuseful, but other can be very interesting. For example, Blog del día started a meme entitled “3 tips to be a good blogger” (in Spanish). A large amount of bloggers followed it and an interesting research on almost all the reactions can be found at Blogging para ser un buen blogger (also in Spanish). Not that nobody could summarize them all, of course – here we have Blogger’s tips on the subject, for example -, but anyway it’s a fascinating proccess of social contribution to the evolution of information.