Memes Gone Wild: What's YOUR Media Appetite?

From a PR person’s standpoint, it just doesn’t get any better.

I have long held a fascination with memetics, the science that purports to study how ideas and culture propagate.  According to the Wikipedia definition: "In his book The Selfish Gene (1976), the ethologist Richard Dawkins coined the ... term "meme" to describe a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to the gene, arguing that replication also happens in culture." 

After all, if one can truly understand how memes work, isn’t that one step closer to understanding how buzz happens, and to making buzz happen? 

Since digging into this and reading books by Seth Godin (Unleashing the Ideavirus), Richard Brodie (Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme) and Susan Blackmore (The Meme Machine), all great reads, I have since come to believe that memetics is more of a pseudoscience than a real science.  There's lots of reasons for this, some of which were explained in my post: Welcome to the New, User Generated Non stop Media Whipsaw.

At any rate, while perusing my daily does of RSS feeds I happened on this “meme” that was started by Jeremiah Owyang, in his post My Media consumption Diet:  "I’m hoping to start this meme, that others will join in and share their media consumption diet, in hopes, that we’ll start to learn how they get information or be entertained. I’ve sort of mixed up mediums, and media types, but after some thought, that’s the best way to organize it."

He goes on to list his media preferences in the following categories: Web, Music, TV, Communication, Movies, Magazines, Books, Newspapers and tagged others to do the same. 

From a myopic PR perspective it does not get any better – to start a trend that might wind up with everyone wearing their media consumption habits on their blog sleeves. 

It is Pay it Forward meets chain letters meets self absorbed blogging culture.  From another perspective, it shows some of the benefits and implications of user generated content. 

I checked on Technorati and over 1000 people have responded. You can sort by authority to see what the high authority influentials are reading, and how they like to get information.

 

 

 

.

Comments

[Jeremiah Owyang]

HA CHOO!

I just sneezed on you, sorry. I'm infectious!

I checked that link to Technorati, but I only see 113 links, not 1000, what am I missing? (besides a zero)

Many folks like to share, and this meme was actually important, it showed how the consumption of media has changed to those who are active on the web. I learned a lot, both about myself and of others.

[rgeller]

My, mistake, it is in fact 113 (as of today).

I did not mean to imply it was not an important meme, quite the opposite - like I said, it just doesn't get any better.

Also, I didn't mean to say that memes don't exist, just that I am not sure if there is a real science (in the hard science sense of the word) behind them.

It would be great to find out examples of other similar types of memes, especially those that really spread.

[Robben Salter]

Memetics is not a Pseudo Science.
and even if it is, the fact that the idea of memetics is spreading from mind to mind, infecting eachother with the concept should be proof alone of it's validity.

[Robben Salter]

Memetics is not a Pseudo Science.
and even if it is, the fact that the idea of memetics is spreading from mind to mind, infecting eachother with the concept should be proof alone of it's validity.