How Ideas Will Survive in the Future?
By Ayesha Khanna

The concept of meme (pronounced ‘meem’) comes from Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene, which explores how a gene propagates itself across generations, sometimes even at the cost of the host organism (thereby the adjective ‘selfish’).

Anyway, the concept was taken up in socio-anthropology and discussed at great length with the question: what makes an “idea” take hold across time and people? A cultural meme, so to speak, would be similar to a genetic meme in the sense that it has the ability to live beyond the life of the organism. So ideas like religion have managed to command attention and loyalty in people for centuries.

Although debates on cultural evolution can get terrifyingly verbose, the discussion takes on a more interesting twist when it comes to the Web. The Internet, as a controlled environment of sorts [think of hypothetically unplugging the entire network and you see it is controlled to some extent], provides a way to explore the idea of meme propagation in a more concrete and restrained fashion, thereby lending it more solidity as an idea and concept.

WHAT IS A MEME?

According to dictionary.com, a meme is "a unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another". In other words, it is any communicable idea which achieves some kind of permanence, however short-lived, through transmission from one individual to another. So anything from Plato's views on governance, to Madonna's latest dance single, can qualify as a meme because it was remembered by people across space horizontally at one point in time, and vertically across generations in time.

Memes have to be passed on using some vehicle, such as a book, a CD, or now increasingly the Web. While its popularity and longevity depends on how much it appeals to people - either viscerally or intellectually, its transference is fundamentally dependent on some vehicle of transport. Many theorists have expounded on why one idea ferments in the 'global consciousness' more than another, but the main thrust of this article is not why but how memes propagate themselves, and how the second generation of the Web, the Semantic Web, is going to influence it.

THE ANALOGY OF THE GENE

If we are going to consider transport and replication mechanisms, we might as well go right back to the inspiration for the meme, otherwise known as the cultural equivalent of the biological gene. A gene replicates itself every time a cell divides so it sustains itself in the host, and is also passed on from the parent to the child. Characteristics of a gene can be summed for our purposes as follows:

* It is a piece of information: A gene is essentially an instruction to create a specific protein, which in turn results in either a physical manifestation, such as eye color, or a process, such as the menstrual cycle.
* It requires translation: A gene is first transcribed and then translated - the first means that its language is interpreted and the second means that its instructions turned into reality.
* It replicates itself: Every time a cell divides or an egg fuses with a sperm, all the genes or some of the genes are propagated respectively.
* It expresses itself at the appropriate time and place: A gene for skin will only express itself in the cells which are in the skin lining.
* It evolves through mutation: Evolution is the tiny changes in DNA which happen randomly; over time, the mutations that are beneficial for the species survive. So the set of instructions that comprise a gene do change over time.
* It works with other genes to perform complex tasks: Often a set of genes will trigger each other using different protein pathways, which results in the completion of a complicated task, such as bolstering the immune system when attacked by a virus.

IN COMES THE SEMANTIC WEB

The Semantic Web is the second generation of the web, and is driven by the goal of aiding human productivity by having agents perform tasks based on information and commands written in machine-readable semantics. Before we explore how the development of the present Web into the Semantic Web is going to effect memes, let's recall that the traditional way of transferring memes was through books, CDs, word-of-mouth, television and other such media.

The best way to examine the influence of the Semantic Web is to use the same framework as we used for genes:

* It is a piece of information: A meme is a communicable idea. In the Semantic Web, this information is encoded more precisely using meta-languages written in XML and OWL.
* It requires translation: When ideas are tagged with metatags and semantics, they are more easily transcribed, and software agents that interpret the semantics can translate the instructions of the meme more easily. Of course, the latter refers to memes which can be translated by machines, for instance, playing a CD but obviously not setting up a government.
* It replicates itself: The Web even as it stands now is a powerful tool for the rapid propagation of ideas, reaching exponentially more people with time. The Semantic Web is glimpsed at a basic level with sites such as de.li.cious, which use tags to allow users to create semantics for defining their links. This makes information more easily searchable, and therefore allows more collaboration in spreading the same idea.
* It expresses itself at the appropriate time and place: Tagging information with semantics allows software agents to manipulate the organized information, and display and store information appropriate to a particular context. Thus, a new Science magazine can choose to display only the latest science stories from the BBC. This is only possible if the feed from BBC tags its science articles as science content and an agent understands how to read them.
* It evolves through mutation: At a basic level, it can be said that mutation decreases with the Semantic Web as information is replicated more accurately because it is tagged more appropriately. However, in the sense of evolution through mutation, the Web opens more and more opportunities for variation and improvement. A cursory glance at how blogs have evolved to become the major online publication forum to vlogs [video blogs] to podcasting shows how ideas bootstrap off each other more easily on the Web than in any other medium.
* It works with other genes to perform complex tasks: Ontologies are used by software agents to use the information in different memes to constitute a task or put together another meme.

JUDGMENT CALLS

The ease of spreading memes is all well and good, but who is to say which ones are better than the others. That is, who decides finally what is good? Well, humans do but they can be aided by software agents on the Semantic Web. Even now, Google helps rank memes by using an algorithm that values pages linked by well respected sites higher than others; in doing so, it already aids the "how" certain ideas continue to stay popular: because they're good! So with the help of agents following certain rules, it is possible to aid even the filtering of better memes from worse ones.

In conclusion, the Semantic Web presents a whole new paradigm for the propagation of memes, giving them velocity and access, while ranking their value with the aid of human instructed rules.