Epilogue

You see now that it is ourreceptivityto your life’s work that matters greatly if you want your meme to be one of the few that enjoys a global viral cascade. With that established, you now see the true nature of our counsel in this book. What raises our receptivity? In our view, the answer is how well it aligns with the psychological bottlenecks of attention, perception, memory, disposition, motivation, and social influence. As Richard Dawkins, the sociobiologist who invented the word meme (see the Prologue) put it, “The survival value of [a] meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal.”

Our thesis began with the notion that many good memes fail that are worth spreading . In network terms, this implies your signal is strong enough, but it could still fail to meet our receptivity threshold unless it survives the bottlenecks that we have discussed at length. You took the time to read this book not just to learn how to make a better meme, but also how to make us more receptive to memes that were already great.

Memetic engineeringis the professional practice of improving memes to increase the likelihood that they will survive the bottlenecks of user psychology. It’s taking action on the ideas in this book. It’s usability engineering and product design with theory. It’s a good day’s work and a very real way to make an impact.

How do you become a memetic engineer ? If you are currently working as an analyst in user-, usability-, design-, or market-research, begin by producing a memetic fitness analysis. These should consist of just four slides with equal parts images and text:

1. The current state of the meme —be it the interface, market positioning, or advertising message.

2. The psychological bottleneck at play —a short summary, with images and citations, of the relevant psychological process influencing users’ receptivity to the meme. Many passages of this book were written specifically so that you could copy and paste them into a presentation.

3. Your recommendation for change —how the meme could be changed to increase its memetic fitness.

4. A predicted business outcome and a way to test it —a means of measuring the increased fitness you are predicting, ideally involving an experimental analysis of behavior.

If you successfully present just one such report, and it is acted upon, then you are a memetic engineer. You may then confidently list this as a skill on your résumé or LinkedIn profile. Don’t stop there, move on to the next meme.

What if you are not yet employed in such a capacity, but you want to be? Simple. Create the same four-slide presentation about a meme whose company you want to work for, upload it to SlideShare, and post a link in the Bottlenecks group on LinkedIn or our other community sites. We who are already memetic engineers will approve it for publication, and you may now interview as a memetic engineer.

Depending on which psychological process interests you most, you will be needed at different places in the tech world. To help you steer your career to the right technologies, the list in Table 1 indicates where the action lies for each psychological process.

Finally, you may decide that your contribution lies with memetic science, that is, continued academic research on the psychology and network diffusion of digital innovations. There is great work happening, and indeed there is much yet to be done. If this is your path, we recommend adding a fifth slide to your memetic fitness analyses :

1. 5. Any modifications or caveats for the theory —whether and how the theory should be modified as revealed by the application to a specific digital environment.

Often, applying theory to a new arena lays bare the assumptions of the basic science, showing that while there may be internal validityto the processes proposed, it lacks externalor ecological validityby failing to match the real world. These discrepancies are also perfect grist for conversation in our Bottlenecks communities. Are we able to multitask while driving? Is there in fact demand to rewatch movies? Does personality add to the accuracy of ad targeting? Does copy to dispel concerns increase conversion rates?

There are also more profound questions that only the most dedicated memetic scientists will be able answer. Are the memes on smartphones addictive, and if so, what is the most effective intervention? What population-wide changes in memory and retrieval can be expected with increased access to facts and knowledge via search? Does the uninhibited expression of polarized opinions contribute to a political and social coarsening of our culture? What effect will big data algorithms of behavior and their use have on our sense of self and our sense of privacy? How will aging populations attribute their challenges with digital memes, to their own impairments or to developers’ biases?

We, as users of digital media, have a keen interest in answers to all of these questions. We really need to see better alignment between technology and human nature. Thus in this piece, we took as our purpose to show specific instances where foundational theory could improve our experience, and in turn, the fitness of the memes. But this is no less true for the most intimate, immersive experiences (privacy, autonomy, independence, and fulfillment of the key goals of our life stage) as it is for granular experiences (a checkout flow on a web, or a relevant advertisement).

For this reason, the application of memetic science to real-world scenarios will both make your work important and also animate it. Social issues have breathed life into psychology almost since it began: Freud gained acceptance when he showed he could use talk-therapy to treat “shell shock” suffered by WW I soldiers (now called post-traumatic stress disorder). Memory and cognition were animated by industrial engineering. Social psychology sprung into life to explain Nazi Germany, and after that, to verify the assumptions of the Civil Rights movement (that separate could not be equal) and understand the resistance against it.

As of this writing, half of the humans on earth have internet access, and a third are connecting to others via social media . For us, it is already true that there is no digital life, there is just life. Technology needs psychology to be successful, but psychology also needs technology. The continued survival of the memes of psychological theory, a great body of knowledge and a profound epistemological tradition, is no less susceptible to memetic extinction than anything else. The digitization of human intelligence and social life is the defining social issue of our time. Thus the memetic fitness of psychology itself will be increased only if students and scholars acknowledge and extend its relevance in technological innovation. This will not be the first time in earth’s evolution that a symbiosis is required for mutual survival.

We thank you so very much for your investment of attention; we look forward to your next invention.