This chapter gives a history of the term 'meme' as it was coined by Richard Dawkins and Douglas Hofstadter's later book on the topic.  The next part of the chapter talks about viral memes, which the author considers to be any meme designed to propogate itself. These memes "invoke an emotion and insist on being spread", such as chain emails.  Those appealing to topics that provoke reaction, such as pity, fear, or sex, are considered to be the best examples of this.  As for schemes, the author defines them as a set of related memes shared among different people. Schemes spread in a way similar to memes, but also through membership.  In other words, if certain members of a scheme are considered to be good authorities or role models, other people, regardless of whether they accept the memes on their own, will become a part of the scheme.

The headings in this chapter look good, although the information (especially the example under viral memes) seems somehow off. As a brief history of the term 'meme' and an exploration of the schemes, this chapter is thought-provoking, but I'm hesitant to necessarily take the ideas he proposes as fact.

This article discusses how memes catch on (or don't) and their impact on culture. The first approach is looking at history as either a narrative or a science. The narrative must be plausible, but not predictable, to be interesting. So too is culture. The things that catch on don't follow a formula per se, but in retrospect they aren't completely out of the blue. The second approach is a comparison with evolution. In this view, it is the glitches that move things forward, not just the formula. The good will continue, the bad will be cast off. However, the line between good and bad is blurry at best, and the very nature of parasitic things like memes is to trick the hosts. The article gives the example of a person with a sweet tooth. If the candy tastes good enough to make the person forget about its negative impacts, it will persist, furthering both the good and the bad qualities of candy. Memes are selected unconsciously and consciously. Even in the case of meme-engineering, in which someone tries to create an idea that will catch on by mimicking what is popular, nothing can be predicted for certain. It doesn't necessarily matter how good an idea is (although it helps), but rather the unpredictable pull of many natural and cultural forces that decides the fate of a meme. Cultural evolution is thus not a direction, but a trend, and not necessarily a very definite trend.

The article touches on a lot of different possibilities, but its tone makes it easy enough to read and digest. The nature of taking the side of unpredictability is that no firm conclusions will be drawn, but the article still discusses numerous possibilities. The question Dennett repeats is "cui bono?" or "who benefits?" He doesn't give an answer, or perhaps the answer is that even if one could measure the benefits, they wouldn't necessarily inform anything beyond that.

Heylighen begins his examination of memes by comparing them with genetics.  Genetics is generally an apt metaphor for memetics. Memes are more or less "copied" from one person to another, sometimes varying from the original. Different memes are more or less consistent, infective, or different from majority or prior notions. However, there are key differences. Memes can be transmitted between any two people, rather than parent-to-child.  Memes also replicate much more quickly, and thus can spread throughout a network almost instantly.

The next part of the article deals with meme replication on the internet. The key parts of such information transmission are the internet's high copy-fidelity (digitization allows for lossless transfer), high fecundity (computers can produce a large volume of copies quickly), and greater longevity (digital information can be stored indefinitely). Consequently, the internet allows greater and more efficient replication of memes.  Real-world boundaries are also pushed aside, allowing diffusion to occur from multiple sources and geographical locations outward rather than from a single source outward and potentially limited by physical and linguistic boundaries. Due to the nature of the internet, permanently copying information is not always necessary, but rather linking to information (with the assumption that it will always exist at that location) is more efficient. This suggests that the number of incoming links to something on the web is important for measuring its spread.

The article also discusses how memes can compete with each other or work together, similar to genes. When memes compete, the idea is that the more popular one will win out.  As it pertains to the web, the more linked site will draw more new viewers who will then also link it, making it even more popular.  For a global network, this means that there would likely be a shared ideology eventually.

This article effectively links the nature of memes and genes. It has detailed information on the properties of memes and how they apply to what gets spread across the internet. What this article is lacking is in examples that support the emergence of a global brain. The theory behind it is well-explained, but the external factors that make things more popular or less popular among certain subsets of society are not mentioned.

This article analyzes how the internet works in terms of memetics. In this way of viewing things, each user and website is a different agent or node in the network: not aware of the underlying structure of the network, but instead only concerned with its immediate links within that network.  Marshall takes a bottom-up approach and applies memetics to each level.  At the operational level, the internet is a series of linked memes through which information and messages are routed through agents that have a specific purpose but do not know the intentions of the central controller.  At the service level, agent are interfaces designed to achieve certain goals through interacting with other agents.  In the example Marshall gives, a search engine for online stores has a goal of interfacing with other agents (the online stores) and processing the information.  At the user level, the internet memeplex is able to transmit information quickly and ignore real-world boundaries. Thus users are able to indicate what information they want to receive, and then get it through the network. Marshall concludes that the memetic support system embedded in the internet make it more efficient and allows each additional layer to perform more useful and complex operations efficiently.

Although the aim of this paper is sound, the connection between each level is not discussed in any amount of detail. The clearest points are the discussion on virtual communities and general overview of how the internet can operate as a series of memeplexes.