Sunday 3 December 2017

Memenomics

The term "memenomics" seems like an interesting fusion of "meme" and "economics". It seems to have become a brand at memenomics.com. I rather like the word but am less convinced by the associated MEMEnomics book and its "vMemes". That seems more like marketing and self-promotion than science.

I think "memenomics" should just refer to some ground in the vicinity of economic approaches to memetics and evolutionary approaches to economics. "Evolutionary economics" already has a pretty nice name, so maybe "memenomics" could be used to refer to economic approaches to memetics. A nice example of this is the well-known idea of an "attention economy" - where attention is a scarce resource that memes compete to monopolise. That's an example of applying economic thinking to memetics, but there are other ways in which economics could be applied to memetics. For one thing, attention is not the only resource that memes are interested in. They also compete for storage space, transmission bandwidth and various other resources.

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