How ideas spread is a subject that fascinates the modern world, not least because if you understand and control that process, you can wield great commercial or political power. Memetics, which dates from the 1980s, uses the model of evolution to explain how cultural information gets transferred. It comes from the word “meme”, coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins in “The Selfish Gene” to describe a unit of cultural inheritance that carries ideas, practices or behaviours – like a gene, though without any physical existence. Like a gene, it competes, gets passed on and mutates. Just as, in fact, the word meme has done.
Malcolm Gladwell, the writer of the (itself very influential) book “The Tipping Point”, subscribes to the epidemiological model of influence, writing that “ideas and products and messages and behaviours spread just like viruses do”. He uses fashion as one example. In the early 1990s, a handful of hipsters in downtown Manhattan started wearing Hush Puppy shoes. Within a couple of years a trend that started on a few New York feet had spread to every shopping mall in the country: America was infected with the Hush Puppy virus.
