Memes Shaping the Blogosphere

The science of memetics – the scientific and systematic study of memes and their
propagation – is not quite considered a science yet. People will concede that memes
are a key factor in cultural evolution, but they are too difficult to track, too
unpredictable to study closely. Unless we "someday discover a striking identity
between brain structures storing the same information, allowing us to identify
memes syntactically" (Dennett 354), it would seem that there is little hope for a
science of memetics. How can we explore and apply memetics to culture if we cannot
isolate and investigate the memes themselves, and their behaviors and effects?

While memes' motion and influence through culture at large is perhaps impossible to
analyze using a precise methodology, memes' virus-like spread on the internet –
most notably throughout the so-called "blogosphere" – is easier to follow.
Consequently, it is also much easier to highlight how memes have directed the
evolution of the "blogosphere," and, indeed, of blogging and internet itself.
Richard Dawkins, who is credited with coining the term "meme," defines it as:

...a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation... Just as genes

propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or
eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain
via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation (Dennett 344-5).