Recently on the Adgitize Forums I asked fellow bloggers what bloggers' memes they participate in. This led to an interesting discussion of memes and the pros and cons of participating in Bloggers’ Memes.

Meme is one of those words that everyone seems to have a different idea what it is. Bloggers often talk about weekly blogging community events like Music Monday, Ruby Tuesdays, Wordless Wednesdays or Follow Fridays. Others question whether or not these are really memes in the purest sense of the word. I tend to think they are and to participate in a few different ones.

Music Mondays is the idea of bloggers putting up blog posts about music every Monday. Often they visit one another’s blogs and leave comments or links. Wordless Wednesdays is the idea of bloggers posting pictures, typically with minimal verbiage attached. Again, the idea is to visit one another’s blogs and leave comments or links. Follow Friday grew out of Twitter where people list people that they like to follow on Twitter, hoping that others will list them as people good to follow as well. I end up doing it as a blog post so people can get the context of why I follow someone. Perhaps the commenting and linking are simply more basic memes that go into these blogging memes.

Yet memes are much more than just little things bloggers do to connect with other bloggers. The Wikipedia definition is “a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena”.

The idea dates back to Richard Dawkins’ book “The Selfish Gene”, written in 1976 the evolutionary aspects of memes. How does “a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices” replicate? How does it morph? What are the history of these ideas?

Some members of the Adgitize Forums spoke about disliking memes. They spoke about it in terms of bloggers memes. However, when you look at it in the wider perspective, being part of a culture means participating in various memes. Do we shake hands with people when we meet them? Do we bow to them? Do we hand business cards to people? Do we use one hand when we do it or two? Do we take off our shoes when we enter people’s houses? Do we say God Bless You when someone sneezes? Each of these seems to be units “of cultural ideas, symbols or practices”.

I thought about this more yesterday, when I went to see Blue Man Group’s performance in Hartford yesterday. At one point, as members of the group went down and interacted with members of the audience, I thought it would be really interesting to see Blue Man Group on Oprah. As I think back on it, I suspect that they were using particular memes tied to shows like Oprah. However, since I don’t watch shows like Oprah, I can’t really name or describe it. Yet it seemed like it was there.

At another point, they spoke about various things that people do at concerts, holding up cellphones and waving them back and forth. This would also seem to be a meme that has evolved over the years. It used to be lighters. This led to someone shouting out from the audience “Freebird!”. This too, it would seem is a unit of cultural practice. In fact, the Blue Man Group seemed to be heavily laden with memes and related ideas. The references to cellphones, texting, Captain Crunch, Twinkies and Lady Gaga would have been completely missed by people from other cultures or times, including fans of Blue Man Group when they first started back in the nineties.

It would still have been a wonderful experience, not recognizing the cultural symbols in the performance and simply absorbing the rhythm, music, and imagery, but it would have been a much different experience.

I don’t claim to know a lot about memes. I tend to look at our culture, at times, from the view point of a detached observer, but knowing the cultural practices, even if I don’t always participate in them, I believe, enrich my experiences.

So, I keep posting Music Monday, Wordless Wednesday and Follow Friday posts on my own blog. I read other blogs participating in other memes, and I enjoy hearing someone shout “Freebird!” out at performances.