Every Old Meme Is New Again

[Ian David]

By Robert Lemos| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Dec, 01, 2006

It's the idea that just won't die: A scientific experiment to track the viral spread of a "meme" -- a contagious quanta of thought -- has become so popular that it's creator has had trouble tracking it.

The experiment being conducted by comparative literature graduate student Scott Eric Kaufman was intended to measure how quickly a simple idea would jump between blogs covering different academic disciplines.

"Scholars, journalists and bloggers write uncritically about the potential of blogs to spread information quickly and accurately," Kaufman said in an e-mail interview. "I want to learn how (cross-discipline) communities are created, and I figured a meme of this sort of limited interest ... would be one way to track it."

Evolutionist and author Richard Dawkins popularized the concept of memes. In the 1990s, Electronic Frontier Foundation pioneer Mike Godwin conducted a famous experiment in counter-meme seeding with his Law of Nazi Analogies aimed at reducing Nazi comparisons in online discourse.

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The success of the experiment is all the more revelatory in that the meme in question is hardly new or novel. One project, known as Meme Tree, graphically illustrated the structure of web linkages. And, in April 2004, a student at Brandeis University performed the exact same meme experiment with similar results.

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