12.3.1. Replication (With Inheritance)# For social media content, replication means that the content (or a copy or modified version) gets seen by more people. Additionally, when a modified version gets distributed, future replications of that version will include the modification (a.k.a., inheritance). There are ways of duplicating that are built into social media platforms: Actions such as: liking, reposting, replying, and paid promotion get the original posting to show up for users more Actions like quote tweeting, or the TikTok Duet feature let people see the original content, but modified with new context. Social media sites also provide ways of embedding posts in other places, like in news articles There are also ways of replicating social media content that aren’t directly built into the social media platform, such as: copying images or text and reposting them yourself taking screenshots, and cross-posting to different sites

12.1.2. Memes# In the 1976 book The Selfish Gene, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins1 said rather than looking at the evolution of organisms, it made even more sense to look at the evolution of the genes of those organisms (sections of DNA that perform some functions and are inherited). For example, if a bee protects its nest by stinging an attacking animal and dying, then it can’t reproduce and it might look like a failure of evolution. But if the gene that told the bee to die protecting the nest was shared by the other bees in the nest, then that one bee dying allows the gene to keep being replicated, so the gene is successful evolutionarily. Since genes contained information about how organisms would grow and live, then biological evolution could be considered to be evolving information. Dawkins then took this idea of the evolution of information and applied it to culture, coining the term “meme” (intended to sound like “gene”). A meme is a piece of culture that might reproduce in an evolutionary fashion, like a hummable tune that someone hears and starts humming to themselves, perhaps changing it, and then others overhearing next. In this view, any piece of human culture can be considered a meme that is spreading (or failing to spread) according to evolutionary forces. So we can use an evolutionary perspective to consider the spread of: Technology (languages, weapons, medicine, writing, math, computers, etc.), religions philosophies political ideas (democracy, authoritarianism, etc.) art organizations etc. We can even consider the evolutionary forces that play in the spread of true and false information (like an old saying: “A lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on.”)