T-metics, the New Mimetics

Business now is fixated on social networks as the key toward understanding how information spreads.  And while there’s a basis for that in mimetics, which is what I wrote about in the early ‘90s, in a book called Media Virus, what they don’t understand is that there’s this other thing going on, which you’d have to call t-metics, teams instead of memes. 

There’s technological memes.  Ideas spread around not just through human word-of-mouth.  If anything, more ideas are spreading around through links and becoming associated with one another through search and through the way they’re ending up connected rather than the way people message one another on something like Facebook.  They understand Facebook because it looks to be an extension of word-of-mouth, but they’re missing the boat. 

What they really could be doing is looking at the way the actual highways are connecting.  The way that data is actually merging and coming together, which is more real at this point than the fact that Johnny told this to Sharon who told this to Sammy.  And if they can’t get that yet, then I can understand why they can’t get that yet. 

60 Second Reads is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock