Gonzolabs

What is culture made of? Where does it come from, and how does it spread? According to a widely cherished (and by others, hated) idea proposed a surprisingly long time ago by Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, 1976), culture is made of units called memes.

Consider this meme:  The Jenga Effect. It keeps cropping up all over the place, for example in ecology, architecture, economics, computing, and psychology.

I had dinner recently with Leslie Scott, the inventor of Jenga, and we tried to figure out how this meme pandemic broke out. She created the game while living in Africa in the 1970s, just as Dawkins was coining memes. (The name Jenga is the imperative form of the Swahili verb, kjenga, to build.)

The game is wonderfully simple: Players takes turns removing pieces from a stacked tower of blocks and placing them on top, trying to not be the one who causes the inevitable crash. After Scott moved to England, she mass-produced the game, the giant toy company Hasbro began selling it, and Jenga entered the pandemic cultural stream.

So what is the Jenga Effect? That’s not so clear. For most, it seems to refer to the continual subtraction of parts from a complex structure until, finally, the structure collapses.  For others, it refers to the appearance of instability due to nonuniformity. Nor is it clear where this meme was born. The earliest references to the Jenga Effect that I can find are this March 2005 blog post about script writing and the July 2005 Science article about ecology. Did these give rise to all subsequent Jenga Effect memes, or did those pop into existence independently?

According to Dawkins and others, memes spread like viruses from brain to brain, rapidly evolving and adapting to each new cultural context in which they find themselves. A fit meme can sometimes increase the fitness of its host. For example: washing your hands before meals. We take this concept for granted because it has become so deeply ingrained in so many cultures. But someone, somewhere in the distant past, must have been the first person to wash her hands before a meal. Of course, it may have been independently “invented” many times. (Though to call this an “invention” is probably giving humans too much credit; it may have been an accidental by-product of another set of ritualized behaviors that then took a life of its own.) Other memes are great at spreading but do their hosts no good.

But the trouble with the concept of memes, according to critics, is that it doesn’t generate testable hypotheses. In contrast to genetics, they argue, there can’t be a real science of memetics. Unlike genes, memes can’t be isolated, objectively defined, or quantitatively compared. But in the Age of Google, perhaps memetics will become a scientific field in its own right.

This week, I’ll be trying out the analytic tools available on the Internet to reconstruct the natural history of the Jenga Effect meme. (Of course, doing so will change the very thing I’m studying.)