Digitalism, Meme Theory and Impact of Internet Shopping in the Jewellery industry As a Case Study.Part One

One of the most brilliant works of our times is a book by zoologist Richard Dawkins entiled, The Selfish Gene published in 1976. More than thirty years later the book continues to offer insights applicable to nearly every domain of our lives and even more so today. In this essay I wish to discuss the meme theory coined by Dawkins and its impact on what I projected in 1994 at www.digitalism.org as The Age of Digitalism.
Digitalism as I saw it then was a future of a viral cultural movement penetrating every aspect of human life emerging as a byproduct of what Bill Gates called “the killer application” in his reference to the emergence of the world wide web and its resulting global phenomenon.(Reference:Shaping the Internet Age

The Age of Digitalism was the dawn of the internet producing an evolutionary stage in mankind which I coined at www.digitalism.org as Homo sapien digitus© (Reference: © Caleekal,A. www.digitalism.org)
Today, 14 years later, after reading Richard Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene, the principle of the replicating gene and the replicating meme crystalized what I had been struggling with all these years in conceptualizing Homo sapien digitus©.
In this essay,I would like to discuss the Internet as a host of a series of memes which replicate encompassing a global lifestyle and culture of memes producing the Age of Digitalism, and its evolutionary genetic transformation of man, Homo sapiens digitus©. As an illustrative example of operationalizing this concept of meme and gene as a replicating continuum in this Age of Digitalism I would like to use Internet shopping in the Jewellery Industry in Part 2 of this essay as an application to demonstrate my point.

What is the Meme Theory?
In his book The Selfish Gene,”Meme” is coined by Richard Dawkins as a “unit of cultural transmission” or “unit of imitation” replicating itself similar to how a gene is to biology. Dawkins states , “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashion, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense can be called imitation…memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the gentic mechanism of a host cell…..
We biologists have assimilated the idea of genetic evolution so deeply that we tend to forget that it is only one of many possible kinds of evolution….( Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford Univ Press, N.Y.,1989 new edition,page 192*.).
Longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity are what Dawkins states as examples of qualities that make for high survival value among memes. The internet and the world wide web in the cultural Age of Digitalism is a prime example where all three factors of longevity, fecundity and copying-fidelity make this technology as a high survivor meme for the present and sustainable into the future.
Dawkins further states,”For more than three thousand million years, DNA has been the only replicator worth talking about in the world…..Once the genes have provided their survival machines with brains that are capable of rapid imitation, the memes will automatically take over…All that is necessary is that the brain should be capable of imitation: memes will then evolve that exploit capability to the full” (*pages 193 – 200, Dawkins)

How does the meme of Internet technology impact the genetic transformation of man into Homo sapiens digitus© ? What is the Culture of the Age of Digitalism?

As Dawkins states, “we are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the sefish replicators” (*page 201, Dawkins). The internet acts as the memetic influence to be a unit of global cultural transmission and a unit of imitation providing a mass series of memes. At my primatial website Digitalism.org developed in 1994, I defined the concept of the Age of Digitalism and its neo-evolutionary stage of man Homo sapien digitus© as:
“What mankind does with the advancement of his intellectual creativity and the innovation of ever more miraculous technologically evolving computer tools has set the stage for its outcome. Digitalism … a form of artistic expression … a Windows 95 political economy … an experience of thought and culture in a compact disc. Something more than an overpowering ideological chip …it is an evolutionary stage of Homo sapiens. Never has man experienced such a revolutionary form of individualism so dynamic. A Stairway to Heaven with social and cultural exchange … an instantaneous cybernetic feedback system … freedom and access to knowledge so widespread and potentially equalized eroding all forms of petty parochialism. The end of the tunnel opens into a new world view and the procreation of a nouveau genetic and evolutionary form of the human brain with virtual sprouting chains of artificial digital DNA and the birth of Homo sapiens digitus.” (Reference: © Caleekal,A. www.digitalism.org, 1994)

After recently reading Dawkins’book The Selfish Gene, it clarified what I foresaw in 1994 in terms of ” the procreation of a nouveau genetic and evolutionary form of the human brain with virtual sprouting chains of artificial digital DNA and the birth of Homo sapiens digitus” I had visualized memes as artificial DNA, or ideas having the capability like genes to transform the genetic make-up of man into a nouveau stage of evolution which was the beginning of the Wired Man or Homo sapiens digitus© connecting to other wired beings globally.
By connecting, memes bond and the internet allows this at such a widespread and fast pace to form teams, groups ,social instituitions, e-commerce, free email services like hotmail, social and business interaction outlets like facebook, blackberries and cell phone connections to the internet,Â political and other market research polls etc. By using a common HTML language and forming a virtual world of websites whereby, memes can rapidly imitate by jumping from one human brain to the other. Basically what the internet does is it cuts through all demographic boundaries through rapid speed, making virtual communities of interest immensely useful for advertising and targeting consumers by interest and as individuals. Memes simplified are units of self-replicating information between human brain “hosts” via mediums of image, sound or text and voice. In the Age of Digitalism this has progressively transformed man into a stage of evolution which I call Homo sapiens digitus© where man seeks to be voluntarily perpetually connected beyond his family, his community, his country into a virtual world of global families, friends, communities,and countries self replicating information meme units whether it be fashion trends in clothing , jewellery, musical tunes, political ideas , science and techno innovative brain waves, etc. all transmitting a new culture, Digitalism.

In 1994 when Digitalism.org was born, the world at that time was on a memetic explosion of creativity and Bill Gates noted ,”As recently as 1994, there were only 500 fairly modest Web sites worldwide…Today, the Internet is far from obscure–it’s the center of attention for businesses, governments and individuals around the world. It has spawned entirely new industries, transformed existing ones, and become a global cultural phenomenon. The “killer application” that transformed the Internet into a global phenomenon was the World Wide Web. Developed in the late 1980s at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) from research by Tim Berners-Lee, the Web was initially created to share data on nuclear physics. By using hyperlinks and graphical “browsing” technology, the Web greatly simplifies the process of searching for, accessing, and sharing information on the Internet, making it much more accessible to a non-technical audience. As the Web’s popularity surged among students, researchers and other Internet enthusiasts, an entirely new industry emerged to create software and content for the Web. This explosion of creativity made the Web more compelling for users, which encouraged more companies to provide Internet access, which encouraged still more individuals and businesses to get connected to the Internet”
(source):

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/billg/writing/shapingtheinternet.mspx

Shaping the Internet Age
An essay by Bill Gates on the evolution of Internet and the technologies that are helping connect people to information, resources and to each other.
Internet Policy Institute, December 2000)

What is the implication of the Internet and its associated series of Memes upon business in the age of Digitalism?
Memes through the internet makes it very fast, using labour and less capital than traditional advertising and easy for businesses to tranform memes into new customers, gate keepers of information and knowledge, form trend setters, provide leads and use branding as a marketing format.
The internet allows memes in the age of Digitalism to maximise the potentials of advertising being very economical because Homo sapiens digitus© does the work voluntarily by being compulsively wired via blackberries , cell phones being connected to the internet perpetuating almost as an addictive junkie that is open to memes to be freely transmitted at all times. Businesses with effective search engine optimization can gather memes to be freely transmitted to homo sapiens digitus © who are open to information at all times by being wired to the internet. Internet and emails have allowed customers to replicate memes at a very fast speed unlikeÂ spreading memes traditionally by”word of mouth”. Self replicating units can now be transmitted the instant a product is available on the scene via emails, Google and other search engine optimization, video clips through You-tube techniques making the spread of branding products spread , replicate and stored as memes. This becomes almost infectious as it parasitizes from brain to brain and becomes “viral marketing”. This kind of advertising allows the product to sell itself without much effort as it is infectious and spreads rapidly.

The internet has dramatically changed the traditional real world jewellery retail stores by giving them an opportunity for a virtual store opening an auxillary click of a mouse digital avenue. This avenue has the capability of providing customers with an infinite display of non -static inventory, education, custom design, designing their own settings for engagement rings, loose stone purchases, individual company branding all with cerification and appraisals, the privacy of consumer purchasing power and many other interactive opportunities via email and live chats.

These changes to the traditional jewellery stores have been transforming gradually. There appears to be a continuum to the degree of online participation by retail jewellers from one end being merely having a web presence like an illustrative virtual business card by basically highligting one or two of their best sellers, profiling their global existence, their demographic location and method to contact them. There is no risk taken at this level of participation and yet provides the retailer a new business facet of “legitimacy” complimenting their “real world” store when a growing number of consumers use the internet as a mainstream in shopping especially prior to travelling locally and internationally.

Consumers view the retailer as a progressive company especially those in the younger generation between the age group of 17-34 who are the technocratic savvy younger generation and very comfortable with the internet. At the other end of the continuum is the full scale jewellery online store with a shopping cart, no real world retail store, virtual stores targeted to major global audiences, VeriSign and McAfee secured to protect consumer confidence and reliability in their purchases and excellent customer service. We will examine examples of the continuum of jewellery internet outlets in Part 2 of this essay.

When a company has a web presence they are making a statement in being part of the digital revolution of internet dominance. This is complimentary to the evolving nouveauÂ state of homo sapien digitus’ culture and behaviour, i.e. the cosmopolitian consumer with a digital “mouse – clicking” pulse at their finger tips participating in The Age of Digitalism.

Using the Jewellery Industry as a Case Study how has the Age of Digitalism and the memetic explosion of the Internet impacted upon this industry?
(Stay tuned for Part Two: The Jewels of www.BlueNile.com: A Case Study of The Age of Digitalism and Its Memetic Impact on the Jewellery Industry with Focus on Blue Nile