Computer Science Approach to Information-Like Artifacts as Exemplified by Memes

Providing information can be expanded to include systems that deliver information-like artifacts. They provide such “things” as advertisements, propaganda pieces, and meme artifacts. Memes are the subject of extensive intellectual debate in science and popular culture because it is claimed that parallels can be drawn between theories of cultural evolution manifested in memes, and theories of biological evolution. Memes are described as self-reproducing mental structures, intangible entities transmitted from mind to mind, verbally or by repeated actions and/or imitation. The problem is that researchers describe memes in terms of English-language text or ad hoc diagrams. This paper considers the problem that the field of memetics lacks a uniform language for examining diverse conceptualizations of memes. The paper presents a unifying diagrammatic representation used in computer science, in which all types of “claimed” memes can be expressed and their general characteristics observed. Several examples from the literature on memes are recast in terms of this representation. The results point to the capability of the proposed depiction to express various types of memes. Keywords—information; cultural evolution; mental structures; memes; memetics; conceptual modeling; diagrammatic representation