Memetic Warfare Resources

Memetics is usually described as cultural information transfer. Various aspects of Memetics deal with the rate of informational transfer and its effects on the brain both short-term and long-term.

Memes are thought of as units of culture that can be passed on by non-genetic means, especially via imitation.

Other aspects of Memetics study how information can spread online, in person, from brain to brain, and in any other form including media. Whether the ideas or information that is shared is based on true or false information, appears to be irrelevant to the rate of spread.

Modern Memetics is the basis of Digital Warfare, which is based on Psychological Operations (or PsyOps) and it is very much concerned with swaying public opinion in any particular way.

Memetics draws its resources from a variety of modern analytical tools that profile demographics, tastes and dislikes, etc. usually known as Psychographics and involving complex mathematical models.

Targeting PsyOps can be achieved with the use of bots and malicious actors behind a screen ready to change perception and public opinion.

Nevertheless, Memetics is not a subject that can be studied on its own. The full scope of the subject deals with Online Data Collection and Metrics Tools with Game Theory, Biology, Psychology, and various Social and Behavioural Sciences and Astroturfing.

Below are a series of some of the most important Memetic papers to date.

Memetic Warfare Resources

A Mathematical Theory of Communication. By C. E. SHANNON. 1949

The selfish Gene. Richard Dawkins. Oxford University Press, 1976.

What Makes a Meme Successful? Selection Criteria for Cultural Evolution [J]. Heylighen Francis, In Ramaekers, Jean, Eds.Proceedings 15th International Congress on Cybernetics, 1998.

Information Processing and Memory: Theory and Applications. Stacey T. Lutz, William G. Huitt. 2003

Tutorial: Military Memetics, by Dr. Robert Finkelstein, 2011

Memetics – A growth Industry in US Military Operations, 2005-2006 – Major Michael B. Prosser, United States Marine Corps.

Doctrine for Joint Psychological Operations, 2005 – Department of the US Army, Navy, Air Force, Joint Operations

Making up History: False Memories of Fake News Stories – Danielle C. Polage, Central Washington University, Ellensburg, USA.

Expelling the meme-ghost from the machine: An evolutionary explanation for the spread of cultural practices, 2011– Article in Behavior and Philosophy – Carsta Simon Oslo and Akershus University College and William M. Baum University of California, Davis

Modelling the Spread of Memes: How Innovations are transmitted from Brain to Brain. 2013. E. Massad(1,2) , A.F. Rocha(1), F.A.B. Coutinho (1) and L. F. Lopez(1,3)

Evaluating memetics: A case of competing perspectives at an SME. GILL, Jameson. 2013

Hierarchical Active Transfer Learning. Proceedings of the 2015 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM), 2015. D. Kale, M. Ghazvininejad, A. Ramakrishna, J. He, and Y. Liu.

Understanding confounding effects in linguistic coordination: an information-theoretic approach, accepted for publication PLOS 1, 2015. Shuyang Gao, Greg Ver Steeg, and Aram Galstyan

Visual Thinking Algorithms for Visualization of Social Media Memes, Topics, and Communities. Colin Ware

Evolution of Conversations in the Age of Email Overload. – Kooti, F.; Aiello, L. M.; Grbovic, M.; Lerman, K.; and Mantrach, A. In Proceedings of 24th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), May 2015.

Incorporating Human Cognitive Biases in a Probabilistic Model of Retweeting. In International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling and Prediction, April 2015. Kang, J.; and Lerman, K.VIP

Structural Properties of Ego Networks. In International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling and Prediction, April 2015. Gupta, S.; Yan, X.; and Lerman, K.

Memetics does provide a useful way of understanding cultural evolution. In Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Biology, Ed. Francisco Ayala and Robert Arp, (2010) Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 255-72

It’s Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare. Originally published in the winter of 2015 as part of the “Defence Strategic Communications” peer-reviewed journal (NATO). Memetic Warfare Part I. Jeff Giesea.

Hacking Hearts and Minds: How Memetic Warfare is Transforming Cyberwar. Memetic Warfare Part II. Jeff Giesea. 2017

Predicting Bursts and Popularity of Hashtags in Real-Time.
S. Kong, Q. Mei, L. Feng, F. Ye, Z. Zhao. In: Proceedings of the 37th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR’14), pp. 927-930, 2014.

Design and prototyping of a social media observatory. McKelvey, K., & Menczer, F. In: Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web companion, pp. 1351-1358, May 13–17, 2013, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. ACM 978-1-4503-2038-2/13/05.

Interoperability of Social Media Observatories. McKelvey, K., & Menczer, F. In: Proceedings of the ACM First International Workshop on Building Web Observatories. May 8, 2013, Paris, France.

The Role of Information Diffusion in the Evolution of Social Networks. Weng, L., Ratkiewicz, J., Perra, N., Gonçalves, B., Castillo, C., Bonchi, F., Schifanella, R., Menczer, F., & Flammini, A. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), August 11-14, 2013, Chicago, USA.

The Digital Evolution of Occupy Wall Street. Conover, M. D., Ferrara, E., Menczer, F., & Flammini, A. PloS one, 8(5), e64679, May 29, 2013.

Clustering memes in social media streams Jafari Asbagh, M., Ferrara, E., Varol, O., Menczer, F., Flammini, A.
Social Network Analysis and Mining 4(237), 2014

Clustering Memes in Social Media. Ferrara, E., JafariAsbagh, M., Varol, O., Qazvinian, V., Menczer, F., & Flammini, A.

In: Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM’13), Aug. 2013. IEEE/ACM

Optimal network modularity for information diffusion Nematzadeh, A., Ferrara, E., Flammini, A., Ahn, Y.Y.
Physical Review Letters 113(8), 2014.

Parallel Clustering of High-Dimensional Social Media Data Streams
Gao, X., Ferrara, E., Qiu, J. In: Proceedings of the 15^th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing, 2015.

Online interactions.
L. Weng, F. Menczer, A. Flammini. Book chapter in: Social Phenomena: Data Analytics and Modeling, Springer 2015.

Where and Why Users “Check In”, Yoon Sik Cho, Greg Ver Steeg, Aram Galstyan. In Proc. of AAAI’14, 2014.

“QUOTUS: The Structure of Political Media Coverage as Revealed by Quoting Patterns” V. Niculae, C. Suen, J. zhang, C. Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, J. Leskovec ACM International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), 2015.

“Exploiting Social Network Structure for Person-to-Person Sentiment Analysis” R. West, H. S. Paskov, J. Leskovec, C. Potts. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), 2, 2014.

“Uncovering the Structure and Temporal Dynamics of Information Propagation” M. Gomez-Rodriguez, J. Leskovec, D. Balduzzi, B. Schoelkopf. Network Science, 2014.

“How Community Feedback Shapes User Behavior” J. Cheng, C. Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, J. Leskovec. AAAI International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), 2014.