Memes and the Transmission of Ideas

Richard Dawkins coined the word "meme" in The Selfish Gene (1976) to describe how ideas spread through a population, passing from brain to brain much as genes pass from body to body.

Like genes, memes are replicators, so natural selection applies to them. Hear a joke you find funny enough to repeat, and it survives and spreads. Hear one that falls flat, and it dies with you. Ideas compete in this way to be passed on, and the ones that win shape our culture.

That matters for advertising, and for communication generally.

Words are still the best way to transmit ideas. We take an idea, find a way to describe it and pass it on. Language carries the code for ideas, much as DNA carries the genetic code.

Pictures, sounds, smells and feelings are much harder to transmit, so we encode them in language to pass them on. The internet has changed things, because it can carry visual ideas as easily as verbal ones. Memes have become much more visual.

But the most powerful ideas are still the ones that can be put into words. These ideas can spread on and off the internet in a way that purely visual ideas cannot.

The easier an idea is to describe, the more likely it is to be passed on, and so to spread as a meme.

Advertising agencies have long held that a great idea fits on a Post-it note, with no need for visuals and no need for detail. If you want your idea to have memetics on its side, that has to be true.

For an idea to spread, it has to be easy to put into words.