The Lifecycle of a meme
According to cyberneticist Francis Heylighen of the Free University of Brussels, memes repeatedly pass through a four-stage lifecycle as they are spread: assimilation, retention, expression and transmission (see Heylighen (1998)). The first two stages move the meme from the eyes and ears of the recipient to their brain, and the second two move it from the brain to a new set of eyes and ears.
Of course, all this is largely happening below the level of your conscious awareness, except on the rare occasions we are actively trying to learn. Yet it must be going on, otherwise how did you pick up that tune you were whistling this morning?
The first stage is that of assimilation, where a new host (that’s you) encounters the meme for the first time. The meme has to be noticed, understood and accepted by the host. The first step here is that the meme must be recognised and processed by the limbic brain. There are myriad things that can prevent this: the meme can be in a language that the person does not speak, it can be so complex that the host’s attention span is too short to receive the whole meme, or it can be confusingly presented.
The next step in the process of assimilation is that the limbic brain in the host has to connect the meme to cognitive structures that it has already accepted as valid - the process of accepting the meme as ‘true’ or rejecting it. For example, if a person were running one of the Christian memeplexes then they would find it hard to accept the fundamental tenets of Hinduism.
If it passes the assimilation filter, the meme then faces a retention test. If the fact is interesting but irrelevant to you then it is unlikely to be stored in long-term memory and therefore will never be expressed. As Heylighen says, ‘Although you may have very clearly assimilated the news that the progressive liberal party won the Swaziland elections with 54% of the votes, you are unlikely to remember anything of this a week later, unless you live in Swaziland, perhaps.’
The stages of meme transmission
So now the meme has a new host that accepts it to be ‘true’ and ‘useful’, but now it has to be passed on to other, uninfected, minds. To do this, we have to retrieve it from memory, place it into a physical shape that can be assimilated by others, and push it out into the world - a process we can call expression. This can be an entirely nonconscious process, such as whistling a theme tune as you get on the elevator or wearing unusual clothing where others can see you, or it can be a conscious process of framing and communicating an argument. It is by no means a foregone conclusion that the meme will be expressed at all - the host might understand the meme but find it hard to put into words, or it might be something they deliberately choose not to communicate (such as an interest in pornography).
The fourth and final stage is that of transmission. The meme must be transmitted in a medium that is sufficiently rich to guarantee copy fidelity and has sufficient reach to reach a large number of potential hosts. The medium could be the spoken word, an image, a text message etc, but as we identified in Memeplexes there are some severe trade-offs between richness and reach.
For example, I could get the idea of memes across by telephoning each of you individually: I can be very persuasive, so there is a good chance you would accept and retain the information, but with a reach of one person per expression it will take a while to get my ideas established. On the other hand, I could take an advert in a newspaper, giving me a huge reach. The chances are that acceptance would be low because you might not notice it amongst the sheer volume of memes in the paper, and retention would also be relatively low because a newspaper advert just isn’t very persuasive for complex arguments. The answer is to use the widest, fastest medium that you can find that is consistent with copy fidelity.
Reproduction rate is also a factor. I could send you a 100-character message via carrier pigeon or SMS text message, but the speed of transmission to you and the ease with which you can forward it gives the text message a much higher reproduction rate (measured in generations per unit time).
To sum up: A meme infects its host by being assimilated, tested and stored: it is then ready to conquer the world. Memes are spread by being frequently expressed and widely transmitted. The best medium has a wide reach and is fast, but it must enable faithful copying.