The gene for your brain

Melbourne Herald Sun, 10 July 2010.

This week I'm going to teach you a new word. It's doing the rounds of academia and is popular in the New York marketing cocktail party scene, so before long it will be on everyone's lips. I know my readers will enjoy being the first kids on the block to use it, so here it is. The word is 'meme', rhymes with cream.

Meme is the invention of Richard Dawkins, the Oxford professor who wrote The Selfish Gene, which describes how genetics and natural selection work. The meme is the social equivalent of the gene - the strand of DNA that determined whether you were born a human, an ape, or a fish.

In the same way, the meme is the germ of an idea that takes on its own life and grows - often in directions quite different from its original intention or meaning. Just in the past few weeks we saw a little meme become a world phenomenon: the vuvuzela. Did you know what one was a month ago? Does anyone in the world not know now?

There are lifestyle memes too. If you ever watch Mad Men, the TV series about advertising in the 60s, you'll soon feel ill from the constant smoking by every character. In the office, at home, in bed, full ashtrays everywhere. Unthinkable now. But just remember back a couple of decades at your own life and work...

This is the difference between a meme and a fad. Smoke-free environments are not a fad, they are here permanently. (So, alas, are vuvuzelas.)

Fashion is full of memes. Remember Cory Worthington's hoodie and sunnies? How many of those do you now seen on the streets of Melbourne? Mini skirts were thought a fashion item. Look around you, even in mid-winter - they are now ingrained in our girls' beings. And that fashion fad for faded blue jeans is still with us 50 years on - it's a meme.

Like genes, memes propagate and mutate. Like evolution, some flourish and grow while others eventually fail to reproduce and fade away.

The internet has provided the most fertile soil for memes. Men have developed a culture of regularly swapping and passing on jokes, funny commercials and sexy pictures. Women have their uplifting thoughts, pictures of sunsets and babies and meditations. (Mind you they also have their jokes and smut, but not as much as men, I think.)

These activities don't come from a compulsion to talk or nudge ribs. Rather they are a way of maintaining contact, telling each other they are still alive. If you want to get evolutionary, it's the modern equivalent of grooming the fleas out of each other's hair.

Smart marketers will spot a meme rising and jump on. Think about espresso machines. You'll scarcely find a café or even milk bar without one. Now it is becoming an essential for every good home. If only you'd had shares in Italian kitchenware importers a decade ago! And the early buyers of the coffee house franchises were able to pick the best sites and get in early.

I'm forever awed by the Paul Potts story and how one song on the internet propelled a good (but not great) singer to world fame, creating a meme that was later duplicated by Susan Boyle, proving that looks and age are no barrier when the meme is on the roll.

A Canadian called Gregory Levey wrote a book called "Shut up I'm talking" and promoted it on Facebook. Before long he had 700,000 fans. Not for his book, which was in fact about international diplomacy, but because the phrase generated a meme. The big question is, how can he turn those fans into book buyers?

There is now an academic field called Memetics which has generated books and PhD dissertations on the topic. Both scientists and philosophers are fascinated by the process of propagating thoughts and ideas.

Marketers, I'm afraid, are a bit more crass. We look on with deep interest and wonder how we can make a quid out of it.