As part of a series of programmes celebrating the thirtieth birthday of the internet, Richard Clay presented a documentary about the viral power of memes…

Here is the programme webpage

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0003g0q/how-to-go-viral-the-art-of-the-meme-with-richard-clay

Memes are so-called after the memetic phenomenon identified by evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976). The idea, in Dawkins, emerges from the concept of replication at the heart of Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis and extends it into the cultural arena…This seemed to propose a way of resolving the nature/nurture debate around the scope and limits of individual genetic inheritance.

The advent of the internet, and its continuous, interactive, and dynamic, digital stream had amplified the significance of the memetic potential of technological environments. Many books have been published to support this memetic extension across advertising and to advance public policy, civics etc…

It was disappointing that Richard’s programme seemed to accept, at face-value, that the meme was a product of the digital realm…in fact, the meme is exemplified by the synthesis of word and image, identified by Moholy in the 1920s, and as typo-photo. It was especially frustrating that no mention was made of the poster in this context, as the source code of memetic communication and as an expression of Walter Benjamin’s thesis about the industrialisation of cultural production.

I have spoken, this last term, about communication design in relation to the machine-ensemble of modern society and how, as that ensemble accelerates and gets bigger, it produces its own image-culture so as to keep pace with the ensemble. Contemporary meme culture seems a perfect example of this historic phenomenon.