What's in a Meme?

The Next Step?

Memetics promises marketers a more scientific way to reach consumers. "Advertising agencies do memetic engineering all the time," says Blackmore. "If you have this color and this shape, then you can sell to this kind of person. It's already being made more efficient." The big challenge for the future, according to Blackmore, isn't finding catchy tunes and phrases; it's engineering the environment for a meme to catch on.

Today's marketers take a page from the books of epidemiology. Find the trendsetters, Seth Godin's powerful sneezers, and infect them. If you get the timing right and achieve critical mass, you'll create a fashion, a fad, an idea epidemic. Finding that timing presents a big limitation -- as of yet, nobody's come up with a surefire way to make the timing fit the idea.

Blackmore envisions a future that transcends that barrier. Many organisms alter their environment to suit them. Beavers, for instance, build dams, making the lakes they like to live in and creating the marshy environment that fosters the trees they like to eat. With a deeper understanding of memetics, Blackmore thinks marketers and idea merchants will be able to do the same in the world of ideas. People will be able to engineer the mental landscape to favor their idea, to sculpt the mind-set of the masses.

It's a pretty far-out idea, but some theorists say it's already happening naturally. Dawkins, a confirmed atheist, says he looks at various human belief systems -- cults, new-age therapies, even mainstream religion -- with suspicion. He argues that faith keeps people from asking essential yet troubling questions about the world -- that religious doctrine determines what ideas a person will or will not accept. Memetic theory suggests that religion may be the most potent marketing model of the new millenium. The question is, do we want it to be?

Some Limitations

The big problem with evolution, of course, is that no one controls it. Meme production and proliferation can't be micromanaged; the system is too complex. If and when scientists or marketers create idea-friendly environments, success is still not guaranteed.

For one, people develop a resistance to ideas. Ever notice how quickly marketing trends move among the young? Pokemon, Tickle Me Elmo, Barney. A memetic explanation of this rapid, rabid adoption of ideas is that children haven't developed the consumer immune system that adults have. Of course, as Paul Ewald point outs, information confers that immunity -- a kind of skepticism meme.

Also, evolution is random. Even in a perfect world any idea can fall flat, and human beings need to become better prognosticators for that to change. Many ideas fail or succeed for reasons difficult to forsee -- new technologies kill off older ones; styles and lifestyles change; attention shifts elsewhere.

More importantly, many evolutionary routes don't lead anywhere. Blackmore likens this dead end to the peak of a short and isolated mountain. "Evolution only climbs hills," Blackmore says. "It doesn't descend. If it gets to the top of a local hill, it won't be able to climb higher until the landscape changes." The QWERTY keyboard is an example of an idea that got stuck on a short peak -- until our mental landscape changes, we're stuck typing with this anti-intuitive device.

To follow through on the mountain climbing metaphor, memetics can't yet tell a business which idea will take it to the top. It only suggests that, if you find yourself looking around at higher peaks, better start at the bottom with a new idea and work your way up again.