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The Apress Business Team

In this series of essays, we seek a better understanding of why some digital innovations and experiences engage us deeply and spread widely, and why others do not, drawing upon the lessons of 100 years of psychological science.

Our fundamental assertion is this: digital innovations must survive the psychological bottlenecks of attention, perception, memory, disposition, motivation, and social-influence if they are to proliferate . Our receptivity to your inventions in this way determines whether we engage with them and recommend them to others—or not.

Who are we? We are your customers, your users, and your audience. You are entrepreneurs, designers, developers, publishers, and advertisers. This series is only worth reading if we can talk with you directly in a first-person plural voice. But this is the usability feedback you always dreamed of, because we are also dedicated students of psychology. Perhaps you were too busy coding in your dorm room or even dropping out to raise venture funding to fully digest this body of theory. But if you read on, it’s because you now realize that our psychological receptivity to your offerings is the difference between success and failure. For just as chemistry is the science behind good cooking, psychology is the science behind good design.

The key lesson of this piece is that our nervous systems are radically bottlenecked, and the retinae of our eyes are only the first of several constrictions. Our capacity for memes is wide and deep, but it is filled through a tiny pipette, one at a time. We are built this way for our protection. We can’t afford to have our brains colonized by memes that take more than they give. Offsetting the sheer number of memes in the information age is our supremely adapted ability to ignore things that, in our words, suck. Our psychological bottlenecks are simultaneously the challenge you must overcome to succeed and our protection from exploitation.

So let’s begin. A meme , if we may define it properly for you, is an idea, an invention, a particle of culture ranging from the simplest to the most complex, whose diffusion through a population can be observed. You are probably familiar with this word, but its original meaning went far beyond LOL cats and political gaffes to encompass almost everything you are involved in creating. The term was born in this 1976 passage by sociobiologist Richard Dawkins, which is worth reading in detail:

• [A]ll life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity that prevails on our own planet. There may be others. If there are, provided certain other conditions are met, they will almost inevitably tend to become the basis for an evolutionary process…

• I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged… The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation . “Mimeme” comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like gene. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme … Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process that, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. ⁱ

Endowing the term meme with the weight that Dawkins intended (he went on to discuss the memes of entire religions), ⁱⁱ we will use it to refer to any invention or work product in whose proliferation you are invested. This may be your app, your web site, your bot, your game, your blog, your design, your interface, your tweet, your newsletter, your movie, your book, your song. All the ads, logos, charts, infographics, tools, reports, spreadsheets, and “solutions” you’ve ever made for your company or your clients. Include too your digital identity, your posts, your pictures, your dating profile, and your résumé.

In the past, few of you could afford to spread your memes through the scarce and expensive communications channels like TV, radio, recording studios, and publishing houses. The bottlenecks were in media then, but not anymore. Because the internet ⁱⁱⁱ reaches us all and launching memes through it is easy and inexpensive, it has not only devalued the old broadcast channels, but it has caused an explosion of content. Look at just one platform, smartphone apps, where by 2015 there were 1.6 million apps on Google Play, 1.4 million in the Apple App Store, and by some estimates, over 9 million apps and web sites on the Facebook Developer Platform. ^iv This has pushed the bottlenecks out to us, the end users, whose nervous systems must play a much larger role in separating the meaning from the noise.

But history, even ancient history, has repeatedly witnessed such explosions of innovation, and scholars are quite familiar with what happens as they run their course. Studying early multicellular life in ancient shale fossils, archaeologist Stephen Jay Gould described what he called the Cambrian explosion . This was a brief period 570 million years ago when evolution burst forth with the most numerous, interesting, fancy, and bizarre animal phyla our planet has ever seen (Figure I ). “This was a time of unparalleled opportunity.” Gould wrote, “Nearly anything could find a place. Life was radiating into empty space and could proliferate at logarithmic rates…in a world virtually free of competition.” ^v

Figure 1. An example of an early phyla in the Cambrian explosion that later went extinct.

But what happened shortly afterward? Most phyla promptly went extinct, except the few vertebrates and arthropods we know today. Gould argued that those that survived made it through key ecological bottlenecks, whereas most did not.

Fast forward to the Facebook epoch, and Cameron Marlow, who pioneered Facebook’s data science team, referred to the same Cambrian explosion to describe the history of apps on the Facebook platform (Figure 2 ). ^vi Mere months after this niche opened in 2007, developers launched hundreds of thousands of apps and games on it. But almost as quickly as they were created, most “died” for lack of attention and use, and only a few proliferated and dominated.

Figure 2. The explosion of apps on the Facebook platform.

Gould may have been looking at prehistoric sea bugs, but he saw a larger pattern when he noted that “rapid establishment and later decimation dominates all scales, and seems to have the generality of a fractal pattern.” ^vii Indeed, history has shown this metapattern to be true of the early World Wide Web (ultimately dominated by AOL, Yahoo!, and Lycos), social networking (Facebook), productivity suites (Microsoft Office), blog platforms (Wordpress), music streaming (iTunes), video streaming (YouTube), messaging apps (Skype, WeChat), and smartphone operating systems (Android, Apple). ^viii As such, there is every reason to expect that “rapid establishment and later decimation” will be repeated among the platforms that are just emerging: bots and chatbots on messaging and voice platforms, in-car infotainment systems, the internet of things, and augmented-reality content.

This is why you must understand your users, and the psychological bottlenecks we employ to ensure that we expend our time and energy only on useful memes. The memes that are optimized for receptivity will go on to dominate, while those that are misaligned with human nature will be selected against and ultimately go extinct, suffering the silent, ignored death of most digital inventions.

Dawkins’ analogy, that memes are to culture as genes are to heredity, also helps to understand why you put so much effort into your inventions, and what your essential challenge is. You likely already know what it means to strive for genetic fitness: spreading your genes through the population by amassing resources, attracting a mate, raising offspring, and caring for relatives. Dawkins’ analogy suggests that you work just as hard to maximize your memetic fitness: spreading your inventions through the culture by attracting attention, retaining it, and encouraging your audience to pass the word. You cultivate your fitness in two separate ecologies like a gambler playing at two tables. In a digital age, fitness may be defined as much by fame as by family, and you make that choice with how you allocate every hour of your day.

But there is yet another, often overlooked, way by which Dawkins’ idea of memes helps to understand the diffusion of innovation. His notion packetizes your inventions into parcels of energy and meaning, just the way genes packetized our understanding of heritable traits. This helps enormously in tracing the transmission of your work, just as it helped to trace the transmission of genes from parent to offspring.

As such, in this piece we will conceptually follow your meme as it leaves a screen and hits the eye, penetrates a brain, is imbued with meaning, and is retained and used—or alternatively—overlooked, discarded, and abandoned. We will explore the forces that determine whether your meme matches our dispositions and meets our needs and is ultimately recommended to others—or is irrelevant, a disappointment, and detracted from mercilessly in our online comments. Ultimately, the survival of your meme through these bottlenecks is what determines your memetic fitness and whether your work will leap “from brain to brain” and across the globe.

If the bottlenecked user is our fundamental assertion, then our fundamental assumption is that there exist many good memes worth spreading that fail due to avoidable misalignments with our nervous systems. We are not talking about all the buggy apps and ranting blogs that we kill off quickly with “user-selection” before they can make further demands on our attention. We’re talking about the myriad of fundamentally viable memes that, through some shortcoming or flaw in their design, fail to pass through the bottlenecks that we use to block out the noise. If you are the author of a truly useful meme, by the end of this series you will learn many concrete ways to improve your work so that we are more receptive to it.

But we offer you our thoughts without altruism. The memes that you build make up the digital tools and environments we use to do our own life’s work, provide for ourselves and our loved ones, connect with our peers, and enjoy the creativity of others or express our own creativity. Your memes undergird our mortal existence from birth to death. Only when your business goals satisfy our life goals will success be assured and mutual.

If nothing else, we hope to evoke both innovative new directions in design and fruitful hypotheses for research. Where we have permission, we will refer to actual research studies that we’ve participated in, sometimes commissioned by tech giants, other times by start-ups, but always on issues where the stakes were high. And to other users like us, we point out that a meme carrier can instantly become a meme creator , so any of us who has ever tried to raise awareness for anything, from a college app to a killer app, stands to learn from this exercise as well.