Même is a French word meaning “same”. In the digital space, a meme is when a piece of content is picked up by the social crowd and becomes reused in different contexts (or with other memes) to add a layer of meaning to the context or the meme itself and becomes a joke with your network. For an in depth look at the mechanisms of the meme, check out this Jam blog post.

The amazing thing about meme is that some people make money out of them – see the Jennifer Aniston video meme – another example nicked from Jam.

Or again Chris Poole and the 4Chan team launching Canv.as, a website dedicated to the mass production of meme-banters… probably not lucrative yet, however quite certainly powerful.

Why are memes so popular?

The meme, as a group phenomenon, create both links between members of the community (whether it’s as small as the hackers of Lulzsec or 4Chan or growing like the whole Twitterati) and instantly build an instant and disposable but effective culture of the group.

For the meme effect to happen, users must recognize the pattern (and the implicit message or joke), without an explicit explanation or caption! For instance, individuals must have a past experience of the meme, or a share a culture with a sub-group.

Basically, a meme instantly creates a past with its memories, inside joke and nostalgia. Instantly, we tap into people emotions… and this is effortless and unco-ordinated.

What can we learn from the rise of the meme?

The major lesson is that rather than reinventing the wheel, the trick may well be to reuse the wheel that works perfectly else where.

For instance, we know that human like mental models, that’s a fact.

In the past couple of days, so many people have been commenting that Google is taking an “Apple look” with their new interfaces, and moreover that Google+ is a copy of Facebook.

But if you think about it a bit more than 5 minutes:

1) Google+ is NOT Facebook (otherwise it would be called.. err… Facebook!?)

2) Users would be definitively confused and put off by a completely disruptive behaviour for a feature as basic as “bookmarking content”. Another example is the UI fail of the video game Fable III as very well explained in this post for UX Booth.

Centralised applications such as iTunes (or most of the Apple products) or Facebook are setting standards (that’s the serious bits) and meme (for the light hearted bits – think the Facebook Like)

A Bit of Theory

As explained by the Berlin School, namely Gelstat Pyschology, and in a simplified way:

Human beings have mental models that they conscientiously – or unconscientiously – follow. For instance we mentally reorganize content in a way we can process more easily.

An easy example is the way we remember a phone number: because our brain can only process between 5 and 9 pieces of information together, we tend to “chunk” content into smaller groups. For instance, it’s much easier to recite your phone number in groups of digits.

Our brain is pretty much like a computer processing the information by finding a logical pattern – see Kolmogorov theories for more details.

Moreover, Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains in his bestseller The Black Swan (that I’m currently devouring and highly recommend) that we can’t help processing information in a narrative way.

Basically, once we’ve collected information, our brain has to put it in a narrative context to regurgitate it in a coherent way.

In conclusion

When it comes to community design, or designing social software, memes show us four things:

1) The designer should take some time to study the interaction patterns around the topic or dynamic they’re working on, in order to understand the current shape.

For example – When Poole’s team released a new version of the famous geek forum 4chan, including a mandatory capcha to prevent spam, the first reaction from the users was very negative.

However, Poole explains how he noticed that gradually the capcha got accepted and actually integrated in the 4chan culture.

2) Help your community to create boundaries and models that will help them create a sense of gathering.

For example Google, after the fail of Google Wave (elitist collaborative platform) and Google Buzz (generalist but leaking add-on) is launching Google+ , using a common pattern for people to interact: +1 is a common geek/internet comment to express one’s approval. However Google uses the word of “recommendation” in their presentation of the service, as this would make more sense to the less savvy user (namely, my mum).

3) Embed the patterns in the design of the platform: design your community environment as a set of tools to leverage those patterns and make them emerge and blossom.

Again – Canv.as is based on this very principle. Another example is Nyan cat where you can access the original gif, video and song should you want to do your own nyan cat meme.

4) Don’t over complicate your interface – make it digestible for a human brain. Moreover, give space for your users to write their own story.

This is the story of twitter, where users took over the app to make it their own space, using hashtags and “traditions” such as follow fridays and RTs (and all the newest ones such as Thursday Confessions, Music Monday, MT for Modified Tweet etc… ) Another example is how the French twitterati has started creating some sort of “written meme” with the use of #coucou (#heya) or #bisou (#kiss) which refer to a viral video and add a layer of irony to their tweet. Complicated or obscure hashtags have no chance to be picked up by the crowd – everything needs to be simple enough to appeal to the human desire for mental models.