Memes have been a favourite topic with me, evident from the fact that of the 151 of the published posts on this blog fully four have had memes as an integral part of the rumination.
For those of you inclined to take a deep dive into memes and how this blog has addressed them till date, links to the four posts are given below:
http://www.hardrainindia.com/2012/08/beyond-brand-meme.html
http://www.hardrainindia.com/2008/09/coming-of-emotion-age.htm
http://www.hardrainindia.com/2013/11/memes-and-coming-general-elections.html
http://www.hardrainindia.com/2014/05/modi-meme.html
Meme: (me~m) n biology an element of a culture or system of behaviour that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by non-genetic means esp. imitation (The New Oxford American Dictionary)
Before the advent of modern communication and travel technology, memes strengthened existing cultural and behavioural modes within geographical/ tribal boundaries contributing largely to the development of a wide variety largely insular civilizations and became the driving force in the creation of nation states.
In the past six or seven decades, modern communications and travel have allowed memes to carry far and wide much like modern epidemics, leading to the emergence of cultural and affinity groups that cut across geographical boundaries. The global youth culture that pervaded in the sixties right up to the nineties is a vibrant example. A side-effect of the emergence of such affinity groups was the emergence of global brands and a global grammar for advertising.
It also lead to the emergence of transnational diaspora identities with major geo-political consequences. Being Muslim or being Jewish became powerful memes with global implications largely due to the epidemiological implications of modern technology.
The past decades have been marked by not one but two major discontinuities on how people interact with each other.
One is that the power of mass media as a broadcaster of ideas and "news" is being transferred to the individual. 21st century technology gives the individual instantaneous and almost free access to broadcast or target-cast (with increasing ability to define targets) information and emotion rich communication at very low production costs, limited only by the individual's cognitive and creative abilities (this blog is an example).
The second discontinuity is in the dramatic reduction of attention spans. The reasons behind this reduction are manifold. One of them could be the unchecked proliferation of messages and media that impinge on and seek attention from the individual. The other is perhaps an increase in the cognitive and emotional bandwidth that allows faster absorption of incoming communication.
A result of the above discontinuities has been the transfer of the power of memes into smaller entities called crips.
Crips is originally the name given, in the late sixties, to African-American gangs in Los Angeles. However it was the sub-culture of jazz musicians in Chicago that gave it the context in which it has gained currency as an idea driving cultural assimilation in the today's world. For jazz musicians crips are momentary, very brief interludes of music which a jazz musician plays around with in the process of improvisation that is the soul of jazz.
In the world of ideas while memes were fully formed, metaphorically akin to say a fully formed jazz composition, crepes are "idea strands" much like strands of DNA that can latch on to other collections of strands around a base structure to form an complete DNA helix. A crip is imminently suited for transmission/ absorption/ re-transmission by the typical low-attention span, digitally empowered, young citizen from the privileged classes of the modern world.
An example of a crip that propagated a decade or so ago was the phrase "whatever". It was a crip which in some cases attached itself to a DNA that defined a linguistic sub-culture while on the other hand was part of a cult of indifference if not outright rejection of the mores of fashion trends. So at one extreme this particular crip became part of a linguistic fashion and at the other extreme it attached itself to a sub-culture formed around the rejection of fashion.
Crips are abundant and multiplying in the modern world allowing an individual to define a cultural profile all her own. She can be a part of a unique cultural tribe of a few and even one with access to powerful communication tools, that were just a decade ago were available only to mass media, to express and sustain her culture.
This is deep-set change that is destroying decades if not centuries old more of whole swathes of society and business.
It's effect on the worlds of marketing and advertising are profound and are still in the process of playing out even as the traditional practitioners deny the need for any seminal change.
I can already see one more post on crips and their effect on the world of brands.
Looks like crips will be fertile ground for this blog to sow over the coming months.
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