It’s not just a catchy phrase. It refers to the process of documenting how snippets of cultural behavior are moving beyond their original culture, and it is one of the most important tools that I believe we can implement to better understand how Global Culture is evolving.
Memes, a concept first introduced by Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene”, are used to describe how cultural knowledge is propagated following Darwinian principles.
To keep the documentation process simple, I propose the following methodology based on the basic principles of how culture is being globalized discussed in the previous post “culture as a commodity”:
- Define how the snippet of culture is transfered from its origin:
- Polarization in which a meme that represents a core cultural value finds a way to persist in its original form regardless of how far it goes. Typically a group of people from the original community physically moves to its destination and continues to enact the cultural behavior.
- Homogenization in which a meme that has propagated through many different cultural groups, continues to do so imposing the behavior changing and replacing others along the way.
- Hibridization in which the propagation results in a modified behavior better suited to the new cultural context
- The other element that is important to document is the pair of communities or groups involved in the process. While this could be done in a large scale using ethnic groups, I’m sure being more granular would render important results as well. That’s why I would go as far as establishing the communities (think town or city) involved.
Assuming a large number of behaviors can be observed and classified according to the method suggested, we could draw important conclusions from the data generated:
- establish the predominant transfer method, which would allow us to determine the mechanisms that are more efficiently transferring cultural behavior.
- influential communities from which a large number of memes seem to originate and propagate across the globe.
- communities at risk which are characterized for not being able to propagate their own cultural behaviors and tend to receive transfers from other places
- correlation between persistent memes and marketing budgets as their primary mechanism for diffusion
- correlation between flow of memes and volume of migrants
Understanding our reality is the first step to support the decision making process. The decisions that are at stake will have a profound impact on the future of humanity, so we should take every step to collect all the information we can.
I will say that the predominant transfer methods for memes are:
1) Language. There seems to be a direct relationship on how memes transfers and keep themselves true and the geographic distribution of a language; Arab, Spanish and Chinese create common grounds that finnish and dutch are unable to do.
2) Religion. If we observe the strong traditions that persists over distance and time of Jewish, even that they are a relative small group, we can see how important a strong religion can function as a vehicle for memes.
3) Economic importance. Larger/Wealthier groups seems to be more successful than smaller or poorer ones. This is kind of obvious but that explains why some fascinating cultures with a lot to give don’t seem to be successful while larger cultures with really empty traditions seems to Thrive.
I believe that these factors are key when looking for a tool that allows memes to be transfered. You can assign a grade on how strong are these factors to predict how a culture will be able to expand or to be ‘contaminated’ with another culture.