Recently, I was struck by this article in Smithsonian Magazine. It is essentially a brief history of the concept of a ‘meme’ and it draws from broader sources than just media study to tell the story of this rich word. I would highly recommend reading the article if you are a media studies geek, as I am. It is well written and informative if slightly assumptive of an older audience set (as I imagine Smithsonian Magazine’s subscriber typically is).

Before I even finished the article I found myself pondering a seeming inherent conflict in our media-saturated world. This conflict is between two distinct points of view which have been played back again and again by pundits and gurus galore. They are McLuhan’s The Medium is The Message and the early Internet rallying cry Content is King. These two phrases have dominated discussions of our exploding mediascape and its impacts on everything from our shortening attention spans to the struggles of the modern marketer. When considered together, they seem to be contradictory points of view.

The McLuhanist holds that the medium, and specifically its effect on humanity absent the content is carries (if it carries content, for McLuhan considered the lightbulb a medium), is the defining aspect of our time. There is of course strong support for this. How did Gutenberg’s printing press change the world? What was the impact of television on radio (and our own opinions of what makes for good music)? Then there is the Internet with its numerous comparisons to being a planet-wide nervous system and even, through the likes of Google and Twitter, having its own sensory apparatus for ‘seeing’ the world and reacting as it happens. Too much thinking down this road takes on Matrix-like posturing.

The counterpoint – Content is King – was the rallying cry of early Internet pioneers who were largely leading the migration of printed and broadcast information toward digital distribution via the Web. Content is King reached its peak back around 1999 as businesses and institutions struggled to understand how to put the Internet to work for their own agendas. The term’s popularity began to wane once e-commerce became more commonplace online. Talk went from providing content to creating transactions. Then came the social web and talk of content was relegated even further back as connectivity and conversation took center stage.

Yet meme’s continued to flourish on the Internet. In fact, marketers came to try and create them via ‘viral campaigns’ designed specifically to birth content that could be quickly spread across our new digital neural network.

Today the Medium is the Message camp and the Content is King camp continue to spar over which philosophy deserves the dominant seat. Our algorithm-centered mindset on all matters Web seems to be favoring the McLuhanists as we try to convert all human behavior to mathematical equations. As if to drive the point home, we talk about the brain as having bandwidth, like it were a computer even though neuroscience says otherwise. In business and pop culture, much of the work of today’s headline-generating innovators is focused on creating media technhologies and discussing how we, like gerbils in a lab, mutate to meet the behavioral dictates of our media environment.

Left unsung – except by the struggling studios and publishers – is a strong voice for Content is King. This, I feel, is one of the bigger mistakes of our time. Innovative technologies are born, mature and become commonplace expectations in shorter and shorter periods of time. With each new technology the number of screens we draw information (content) from increases and our time spent on any one of them decreases. This is the real pragmatist’s math for our time. Our great grandparents read newspapers and late in life, listened to radio. Our grandparents read papers, listened to radio and watched TV. Our parents had all of these plus early video games, cable TV, specialty magazines, etc. And today of course we have all of that plus smartphones, PDAs, tablets, laptops, Wii, XBox, PSP, etc.

Without a doubt the media themselves have altered our behavior and means of engaging with the world. Alongside the explosion of screens and creation of a sophisticated network of information pipelines there has been an explosion of content. This is not merely a volume story, though the volume usually leads the discussions about noise, awareness and filtering. This newer wave of content has become very, very specialized. There are now quite literally hundreds of ‘channels’ (defined here as websites, blogs, TV channel and shows, radio programs, apps, games, etc.) for any interest, no matter how obscure. I just Googled ‘Medieval Maypoll Dancing’ and got 71K returns. The net effect of this explosion of content playing out over an explosion of screens is the now cliché ‘consumer empowerment’ we all talk about.

Life On Demand.
I believe today we live in an absolute on-demand world. We expect to be able to get endless information, opinion and peer validation on any topic we want, at any time we want. This expectation devalues the media-centric approach because novel technologies become base expectations in short order. It also undermines the content-centric approach because people are not passive recipients of content. They want to share it, discuss it, dissect it, and use it as social capital (bragging rights, etc.).

This on-demand world means we are all highly intolerant of sitting through anything we’re not absolutely interested in at that moment.

That’s where community comes in. A community takes some of the guesswork out of communication. Advertisers used to say they knew half their budgets were wasted, but just not which half. That’s because all they had to go on was content (the program they bought advertising on) and media (TV, radio, print, whatever). Communities were nearly impossible to map at the time so you had to hope/guess that someone tuning into Cosby was also in the mood to hear from P&G.

That’s all changed now. Communities are not only easy to map, but they pop up all over. People are self organizing in new and interesting ways. When an individual joins a community they become easier to reach. Participation in a community indicates an interest in a topic at the time of community interaction. For example, if you’re actually into medieval Maypoll dancing, chances are you belong to a community that is also into it. That community may be online or off. It may use cell phones, email, or meet in cafes to talk. When you’re with that community (which, importantly, is not all the time) chances are you’re talking about the very topic the community gathered around. If someone who played medieval Maypoll music goes into that community, the chances that the content they’re delivering (the music) is in the right place at the right moment are considerably higher.

The nuance is to remember that each of us belongs to multiple communities. Our primary community is whichever one we’re in at that moment. We’re topical chameleons in that sense. When we move into a new community, our expectations of content and the medium it comes in through will change.

Thought of this way, ‘community’ is a meta category under which specific media and content can be organized. Communities can be defined by their content and how that content is shared/exchanged. This is a reorientation of communication. Rather than saying ‘I’m going to reach out through print or online or Facebook or events’ one would begin by thinking ‘I’m going to reach out to the Medieval Maypoll Dancing community’.

Communications planning then becomes a study in understanding a community.

Circling back to the beginning of this post, it dawned on me while writing this that memes are a perfect expression of this idea. Memes tend to be inside jokes understood by a certain community. Some gain a critical mass but that has more to do with the elevation in status of a certain community which makes it desirable to more people. For example, many meme’s like LOL Cats and All Your Base Are Belong To Us were born in the early Internet user community. That community has been gaining in social stature ever since the birth of PCs and the Information Age. Magazines like WIRED often run articles celebrating the rise of Geek culture and super-models go on late night talk shows trying to sell themselves as ‘geeks at heart’. Its not surprising then that people would try to cash in on Geek chic by transacting in these memes. They are badges of membership within that community.

The Smithsonian piece made a point of presenting memes through the analogy of a virus. It explained how a meme needs a host who ideally benefits from the meme as an incentive to help it propagate – precisely what happened with many Internet culture memes. So, like a virus, a meme will greatly increase its likelihood of replicating and thriving if it can find a community of hosts (vs. just moving from single random host to single random host).

Take that last sentence and substitute ‘communication’ in for meme. Suddenly Content is King and The Medium Is The Message feel more like ingredients than the finished product.