information propagation Quotes

The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.

The word is now a virus.

Within hours, tweetted piece of information you've just doled out has become a monsoon, a hurricane of tangible energy that is literally circulating the world. It's helped me sense the undeniable truth of quantum consciousness, the whole butterfly effect. I witness it daily. Being witness to it not only makes me come alive, it enables me to maintain hope.

A meme (rhymes with dream) is a unit of information (a catchphrase, a concept, a tune, a notion of fashion, philosophy or politics) that leaps from brain to brain. Memes compete with one another for replication, and are passed down through a population much the same way genes pass through a species. Potent memes can change minds, alter behavior, catalyze collective mindshifts and transform cultures. Which is why meme warfare has become the geopolitical battle of our information age. Whoever has the memes has the power.

What is unusual about Earth is that language, literally, has become alive. It has infested matter. It is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us.

In my time, the follies of the town crept slowly among us, but now they travel faster than a stagecoach.

Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.

For hundreds of millions of years, Sex was the most efficient method for propagating information of dubious provenance: the origins of all those snippets of junk DNA are lost in the sands of reproductive history. Move aside, Sex: the world-wide Web has usurped your role.

In neither his definition nor the examples illustrating what memes are does Dawkins mention anything that would distinguish memes from concepts.