"You wanna get deep?" asks Watkins Tudor Jones of zef rap group Die Antwoord in a 2010 interview with The Times of South Africa. Their 2012 music video for the track Fatty Boom Boom - which combines an irreverent Laga Gaga parody with shots of rappers Ninja and Yolandi Vi$$er dancing frenetically in white and black body paint - has amassed over 15 million hits on youtube since it was first posted. Along the way it's sparked accusations of racism and prompted scathing attacks from Lady Gaga’s fans, while Die Antwoord have been head-hunted by everyone from advertisers to Hollywood.
The video was also one of the internet 'memes' up for discussion in a Shoreditch basement at Future Human's
'Meme Control’, the last salon of 2013.
So what is a meme and how deep do they get? Are they just time-wasting internet distractions or do they say something profound about the human condition?
The term was originally coined in The Selfish Gene, a 1976 book by Richard Dawkins in which he proposes that genes, like viruses, rely on humans to be passed on. “Genes are the replicators" Dawkins wrote "and we are their survival machines.” Towards the end of the book, he goes on to suggest that perhaps culture could be seen in a similar way. He created the word ‘meme’ from the root 'mimeme', Greek for ‘imitated thing’, to describe "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture”. Since then, the word has been appropriated by internet culture to explain the ‘viral’ proliferation of cat videos, animated gifs and anodyne quotes which seem to take up so much of people’s attention online.
So what are the links between the two, and why do people share these things? Future Human’s Jack Gwilym Roberts opens the evening, updating Dawkin’s theory with some thoughts on evolutionary psychology. This is the idea that all behaviour can be traced back to primal urges - to mate, to eat, to ship our pants (20 million views). So are we, as Dawkins suggests, controlled by our memes? Does sharing demonstrate altruistic behaviour, which helps us to work and survive together as a society? Do we copy and share because we want to look good to potential mates? Or in sharing internet memes are we just breeding idiocy? Are they, like religion, just a way for us to simplify the world, to rationalise experience and relieve stress in a complex environment?
Basic emotion is a critical factor, says Holly Clarke, a former 'meme scientist' at Unruly media, who admits partial responsibility for the T-Mobile Dance (38 million views) and the Evian Babies (72 million views). Viral ads, she tells us, rely on feelings such as surprise, anticipation, fear and disgust, to stimulate a physical reaction. But it seems that as we find ourselves exposed to ever higher volumes of 'content', we quickly become numb to these provocations. It’s all about "being more epic than the last epic thing". Your viral ad needs to have “a wtf?! factor” to survive. This certainly seems to be something which Die Antwoord have understood.
Tony Sampson, author of 'Virality', thinks that this leads less a case of survival of the fittest and more a reign of the idiot.
'Cognition is the enemy of marketing,' someone tweets to the screen.
“Exactly,” says Tony.
The internet is still in it's infancy, says Holly. We're still learning what to read, what to look at, and what to share. Effectively, we’re still learning how to manage our attention online. "The BBC still has lots of awful things at the top of it's most read,” she points out. Ideas which are simply ‘wacky’ quickly dissipate though. “Who’s going to care about the Evian Babies in a few years time?” asks the woman who created them.
Whereas people used to share things just because they were “a stupid internet video”, now, says Clarke, people are looking for something real. Hence the increasing use of hidden cameras and user generated content in mainstream advertising. Think Kevin Macdonald and that Sainsbury’s Christmas advert.
Maybe this is a sign that the internet is growing up? So the question is, as it matures, is the internet is going to become more responsible? Perhaps it already is, says Holly, it just depends on who's using it. She points to open data culture, while in his opening presentation Jack cites Avaaz, an online campaigning organisation with over 30m members worldwide, as an example of using the rules of memes to do good.
One person who takes his responsibility very seriously is Stuart Calimport, founder of The Human Memome Project (great name). Stuart, who comes across as a very earnest member of the Quantified Self movement, has begun to create metrics around his own response to memes, in the Dawkinsian sense, and to compare his results with others. Unlike most marketing companies, he says his primary motivation is to look for the health and longevity predictors which they might reveal. Stuart wants to live forever and is interested in the ideas and behaviours that are going to help him get there (and you too - for the right amount of money). He believes that everyone has a 'memome', a sequence of constituent ideas and influences that has shaped their personality in a similar manner to DNA. If only we could work out how to shape them in the right way… This links back to an idea Jack mentioned in his introduction. If the brain can be seen as hardware, for the software of the mind, then perhaps memes are the code?
Not in the eyes of Sampson, who thinks that all of this is founded on pseudo science. "Culture is not biologically determined," he tells us, and "meme is a dodgy theory… a control mechanism for a certain system of belief". The question of how ideas spread is an old one, Tony says, which can be traced back to the development of crowd theory at the turn of the 20th century and the rise of socialism and popular fascism. The transfer of ideas is really about society and about networks. Computer viruses such as ‘Melissa’ and ‘I love you’, are spread socially.
"People will only share if they think they're the influencer" says Holly. It's about having content which engages and provokes, but it's also about seeding this content with the right people at the right time. It's about finding those key influencers who everyone else copies.
Again Tony disagrees. Read 'Is the Tipping Point Toast?' he urges us. This is a Fast Company article by Clive Thompson, which outlines research by Duncan Watts seemingly discrediting Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that a small number of very cool people dictate the trends that everyone else follows. Gladwell based his theory on a famous 1967 study in which a sample group was asked to pass letters to a certain individual through their personal networks alone. It was found that the average number of links from sender to the recipient was six, hence the degrees of separation, but also that the majority of letters went through the hands of three key individuals.
Interested in these ideas, Duncan Watts, a network scientist, set up a number of much bigger computer simulations to test the theory. To cut a long story short, he concluded that while the six degrees finding held true, a trend or meme could in fact be started by anyone in the network. Although it was true that those started by key influencers spread wider and quicker, there was statistically more chance that a trend would come from elsewhere. Trends, he concludes, are more akin to wildfires than viruses. Hundreds of fires take place in forests, but they only turn into wildfires when the conditions are just right. "If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn't, then almost no one can," Watts concludes.
So it's all about creating something to match the public mood, which is exactly what Holly claims to have achieved with her viral successes - deploying retro music, rollerskates and cuteness as a killer combo. At the same time, though, I don't think we can discount the need to disseminate ideas in order for them to take off. While Watts’ computer generated results did show that an idea can start anywhere, and be carried by word of mouth, it also proves that it’s when people with large networks or audiences pick up on them that they really spread. For each of her campaigns, Holly sent the videos to people with large online followings at just the right time for them to create a surge of interest which quickly snowballed.
I think the confusion here is with how we see these people. Yes, they are influencers, but, as with all of us who create, curate and share content online now, they are also now publishers with audiences to entertain (shows us those thumbs! Bask in the reassuring glow of those retweets!). Hence a desire for exclusive content which will spread quickly, rather than something which takes too long to digest and think about (like this blog).
Which brings me to a comparison with pre-internet media. Which newspapers sell the most copies? In the UK it’s the The Sun and The Daily Mail. How do they do it? By getting exclusive stories which provoke basic emotional reactions and harness the public’s mood.
So perhaps things really haven’t changed that much after all, and maybe it’s not the internet that needs to grow up. You might even suggest that the best way to improve our Human Memone is simply through a good education - the most effective form of memetic engineering (to extend a metaphor). I strongly believe that basic secondary education should include critical analysis (ie. thinking for yourself), media literacy (ie. being able to understand how the media works) and some understanding of the power structures of society (ie. the agenda behind it all and how to play the game). But then I guess we can’t all be as earnest as Stuart, or as pessimistic as Tony, and those cat videos really are much funnier than homework... *
*Besides, Michael Gove thinks education should be more about mnemonics than memetics, and he's in charge now.
