[Reader-list] The Spread of Ideas and Censorship:MEME to YOUYOU to ALLALL

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Anyone Interested in the ways in which ideas travel and re-route themselves 
around the roadblocks of censorship would find the notion of 'Memes' 
valuable. What is a Meme ? Here's a handy definition. Notice how 
information theory, biology, genetics, epidemiology and social patterns 
coalesce in this idea. Someone sent me a meme, and as it is in the nature 
of memes to spread, this one is spreading,

MEME: (pron. `meem') A contagious information pattern that replicates by 
symbiotically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing 
them to propagate the pattern. (Term coined by Richard Dawkins,  a 
geneticist, by analogy with "gene".) Individual slogans, catch-phrases, 
melodies, icons, inventions, and fashions are typical memes. An idea or 
information pattern is not a meme until it causes someone to replicate it, 
to repeat it to someone else. All transmitted knowledge is memetic.

For more of this delicious soup - check out 'Electric Escape' the Memenetic 
Lexicon Website at
http://www.digiserve.com/eescape/library/memetic-lexicon.html#MEME
Enjoy ! and spread all memes that come to you. The system will crash 
someday with an overloading implosion of meaning/meming :)
Cheers

Shuddha


Shuddhabrata Sengupta
SARAI: The New Media Initiative
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29, Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 052, India
www.sarai.net