And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [11]
FIG. 1-1: SCHEMATIC, MOB #3 IN GRAND HYATT HOTEL
The handful of hotel guests were still there, alone again, except now they were confronted with a hundreds-strong armada of mobbers overhead, arrayed shoulder to shoulder, staring silently down. Intimidation was not the point; we were staring down at where we had just been, and also across at one another, two hundred artist-spectators commandeering an atrium on Forty-second Street as a coliseum-style theater of self-regard. After five minutes of staring, the ring erupted into precisely fifteen seconds of tumultuous applause—for itself—after which it scattered back downstairs and out the door, just as the police cruisers were rolling up, flashers on.
THE MEME, SUPREME
From the moment flash mobs first began to spread, there was a term applied to them by both boosters and detractors, and that term was meme. “The Flash Mob meme is #1 with a bullet,” wrote the author Howard Rheingold on his blog. Three days later, on MetaFilter, one commenter wrote, “I was going to take the time to savage this wretched warmed-over meme, but am delighted to see that so many of you have already done so”; countered the next commenter, “I happen to think the meme is a bit silly, but the backlash even more so.” In September, when the comic strip Doonesbury had one of its characters create flash mobs for Howard Dean, one blogger named Eric enthused, “Trust Gary [sic] Trudeau to combine the hottest memes of the summer,” adding as an aside: “Yes, I fully realize that [I] just called Dr Dean a meme.”
Readers will be excused for their ignorance of this term, though in 1998 it did enter the Merriam-Webster dictionary, which defines it as “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.” The operative word here is “spreads,” for this simple monosyllabic noun has buried within it a particular vision of culture and how it evolves. In a meme’s-eye view of the world, any idea—from a religious belief or a political affiliation to a new style of jeans or a catchy tune—can be seen as a sort of independent agent loosed into the population, where it travels from mind to mind, burrowing into each, colonizing all as widely and ruthlessly as it can. Some brains are more susceptible than others to certain memes, but by and large memes spread by virtue of their own inherent contagiousness. The meme idea, that is, sees cultural entities as being similar to genes, or better, to viruses, and in fact the term “viral” is often used to express the same idea.
If we consider the meme idea itself as a meme, we see that its virulence in the Internet era has been impressive. The term was coined in 1976 by the biologist Richard Dawkins in his first book, The Selfish Gene, in which he persuasively argues that genes are the operative subjects of evolutionary selection: that is, individuals struggle first and foremost to perpetuate their genes, and insofar as evolution is driven by the “survival of the fittest,” it is the fitness of our genes, not of us, that is the relevant factor. He puts forward a unified vision of history in which replication is king: in Dawkins’s view, from that very first day when, somewhere in the murk, there emerged the first genes—molecules with the ability to create copies of themselves—these selfish replicators have been orchestrating the whole shebang. After extending out this argument to explain the evolution of species, Dawkins turns to the question of human culture. If replication, over long periods of time, explains why we exist, then might it not serve also to explain what inhabits our minds? Dawkins writes, with characteristic flourish,
I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup. . . . The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission,