Last week I couldn’t help but come across the 2005 bloggy awards site. The nominees are already in so don’t bother nominating this patch of turf. Among the categories included the “best meme” category. A meme has some fairly wide and far reaching definitions but I would prefer to think of a meme as an infectious idea virus. The difference between an idea virus is that a physical virus needs to have a way of infecting cells while an idea virus goes right in the senses, finds a home in the neural system, and then pops back out through the body through communication. Susan Blackmore wrote a thorough book exposing the nature of these nearly live things and was so bold as to claim that memes themselves are the source of latter evolution of humans to have higher functions. The idea goes back to the work by Dawkins that exposes that the only real point of an elephant is a very complex but functional mechanism to make more elephant genes. So the reason to make humans (make is loosely coupled from the biblical creationist bent on the word since evolution is a creative process – thus the elephant) is so that those memes have a place to scurry around and live. Once they carved a niche somewhere they cut it wide open to make brains as large and interesting as Einstein’s. He had a miraculous year about 100 years ago. Blackmore’s book is called The Meme Machine for anyone interested in such things. I’d recommend reading Climbing Mount Improbable before reading it if you have the chance.

The meme’s eye view of the world is a great way to look at the continued evolution of the Internet and the ideas floating around on search engines. In the Internet the meme has found it’s way to a reproductive panacea with data traveling quickly and scaling rapidly from host to host. The fast movement can suddenly make a green pornographic image of Paris Hilton the most sought after idea for a brief point in time only to move on to another idea like Janet Jackson’s exposed breast a few months later. Now the memes are getting recognition at the top of an awards category about the meme-like blog phenomenon. Jump on the bandwagon – don’t worry nobody will care. The memes will love you.

Through the best meme category I found some interesting sites with infectious qualities. My favorite one was Photo Friday, a site that holds a free contest for people to send their best picture to match a specific idea. Past items included modern, crowded, and signs. I looked for what I thought would be the meme of the past few weeks but didn’t find it used yet - freedom.

I’ve been hearing a lot about freedom the past few weeks. Partly it is because I was reading The Case for Democracy but that was just an effect of reading about the election in Iraq and trying to understand it’s importance. If I could paint I would take pictures of some of the images in my head from the news. One was the terrorist acts against the voters in Iraq. The voters in small towns used a voting system that turns your finger blue. That way you can tell who has voted so that nobody votes twice. A group of terrorists attacked a group of voters singling them out because their fingers were blue and killed them for voting to intimidate future voters. Although the Superbowl is just a game the symbolism of freedom is rampant on the east coast with a team like the Patriots clad in the red white and blue colors and the Eagles from Philadelphia standing in the uniforms with the symbol of a raptor at the top of the food chain that symbolizes freedom for our country. Gadi recognized that freedom is the popular word today and littered an invitation to his monthly SabAbaS party with references to freedom.

What is interesting is that the argument made by Sharansky is that peace between countries begins first with the establishment of democracy and the best and apparently only avenue to achieve it is to first create human rights. His questions to determine whether human rights are upheld in any country are simple ones:

Could people in that country speak their minds?
Could they publish their opinions?
Could they practice their faith?
Could they learn the history and culture of their people?

So the meme machines are hard at work fighting for freedom over fear. People around the world are openly or secretly hopeful that countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia that surround Iraq will be infected with the meme-virus of freedom. The dictators of those countries must be afraid of the pending epidemic infection and are working to innoculate themselves with new strains of a virus of fear that they will unleash upon their people and will send in small bits through terrorists crossing borders into Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Africa, and America.

Maybe with the help of the Internet we can crack the nut wide open in this century through our new found meme amplifier and move into the next phase of civilization without so much bloodshed. It is too bad fear can't always die as it should - Not with a bang but a whimper.