Our brains are anatomically identical to those of early humans. The difference between present day prosperity and pre-historic poverty, is our memes: ways of working, knowledge of tools, and cultural norms. Different memes have different virality factors, retention rates and tendencies to mutate. Some memes, like the ‘ice bucket challenge’, are highly infectious but burn out quickly, as they confer no real world advantage. Short term trends follow fashion, but the long term is governed by the Lindy effect: the longer something has been around, the longer it is likely to survive. Usually you need a technological shift: horse riding was useful for most of history, but became a niche interest after cars arrived.
Memes mutate away from the initial intention of the transmitter: Fight Club warned of toxic masculinity, but regularly gets quoted by toxic men. Memes that depart from reality can suffer rapid collapse, as the hosts they infect try to actively forget them, to re-gain an advantage. You have to work just to maintain: brain space is limited, and there's constant competition for our attention. As new marketing tactics are proven to work, news of their success spreads, and they become saturated. The first banner ads enjoyed a 78% click-through rate - today you’re lucky to get 0.05%. People start to block them out - literal ‘banner blindness’ - and the tactic loses its effect. So don’t make your ‘brand bible’ too overbearing: bureaucracy enforces the use of memes that work today, at the cost of missing out on what's next.
| Name | Link | Type |
|---|---|---|
Banner Blindness | Reference | |
Competition among memes in a world with limited attention | ||
Growth Is Never Done | Blog | |
Lindy effect | Reference | |
On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities | ||
Paul Bailey on Twitter | Social | |
The growth, spread, and mutation of internet phenomena: A study of memes | Paper | |
The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs | Blog | |
‘Fight Club’ Author Reflects On Violence And Masculinity, 20 Years Later | Article |