Current

Past

Military Memetics (Information Propagation, Impact, and Persistence – Info PIP) Project

We initiated the Military Memetics project in 2006, under sponsorship of an agency of the Department of Defense. The initial focus is to establish a scientific basis for memetics in order to predict and control memes and their effects; applications will subsequently follow the rearch. Ultimately, Military Memetics may be able to: develop a new, peaceful approach to countering terrorists and insurgents, before and after they become terrorists and insurgents, by: influencing behavior in a predictable way; preventing irrational conflict and promote rational solutions to national and international problems; strengthening the U.S. military in peacekeeping missions, psychological operations, recruitment, and training; and making new scientific discoveries concerning the human brain, cognition, and social networks.

A concise definition of a meme is: a meme is information which propagates, persists, and has impact. Memetics is the study of memes.

Below is an Overview of Military Memetics which was updated in September 2011.

[Please click here for an Overview Presentation of Military Memetics]

Memetics Compendium

We created a Memetics Compendium to provide a broad overview of memetics based on a variety of papers by various authors. These digital papers were gathered from the Internet during 2006 to 2008, assembled, and, in some cases, edited for grammar, spelling, and clarity; all of the papers were transformed into a common format (font, font size, appearance) for coherence to ease reading. The compendium was developed as part of memetics research conducted for a Department of Defense agency.

In the more than 30 years since the meme was identified as an entity of interest, there has been almost no research to determine whether memetics can be placed on a scientific basis so that its phenomena and effects can be quantified, predicted, and controlled. Most of the research of memetics, such as it is, has been conducted in scattered efforts, often as personal projects on the part of dedicated academics, mostly outside the U.S. There have been no significant, coherent efforts until now, where there is an attempt to determine whether a scientific framework can be established for memetics.

The papers were selected subjectively, based on their perceived relevance to the subject and interest to the reader. For the ease of locating papers in the Compendium, they are arranged alphabetically by author, rather than topic.

Following this Introduction is a section of Compendium Excerpts, with passages we subjectively extracted from the papers based on what we thought might be of interest to the memetics project. The excerpts are alphabetical, by author, so the original complete text can be found easily in the Compendium by readers interested in a particular passage.

A separate volume includes articles and papers which are relevant to memetics but are not directly about memetics.

The basic purpose of the Compendium is to provide an indication of the prospective value of memetics to the U.S. military for conventional and asymmetric operations, including counter-terrorism.

The attempt to establish a scientific basis for memetics is critically important. For example, within a suitable memetics framework could be the means to prevent irrational conflict and promote rational solutions to endemic national and international problems. Of course, without safeguards memetics can become a double-edged sword.
 

[Please click here for a Memetics Compendium]