Online and offline communities

Memes / Cultural Replication

Watch a simple cultural pattern spread and mutate. Versions that are easier to recognise, repeat, or adapt become more visible over time.

Watch cultural patterns compete for attention

Watch abstract meme tokens copy, mutate, and remix as they move through a network. Recognition, novelty, shareability, and fatigue decide which versions stay visible.

Meme variants: A meme is not just copied; it is often remixed. This demo shows cultural variants competing for attention as they mutate, recombine, spread, and fade.

What to watch: coloured pulses carry variants along links, nodes switch tokens as attention shifts, and a small family of versions competes instead of one claim simply infecting everyone.

Explanatory notes

A meme is not just copied; it is often remixed as it moves.
Recognition helps transmission: people pass on what others can quickly understand.
Selection pressure can favour humour, outrage, simplicity, or identity signalling.
The network changes the meme, and the meme can also change the network.

Observe

Small cultural patterns are copied, varied, selected, and recombined as they move through groups.

Controls

Explore replication

The exhibit is abstract: nodes are people, lines are social links, and moving pulses are copied cultural tokens.

Copying creates reach: Shareable variants are more likely to travel to neighbours.
Mutation creates families: Copies sometimes change into related colours, glyphs, and short labels.
Remix creates hybrids: Nodes exposed to multiple visible variants can combine them into a new token.
Fatigue creates selection: Repeated versions lose appeal unless recognisable and shareable enough to survive.

Advanced tuning

Network size84 How many people are in the cultural network. Shareability0.92 How easily meme variants are copied by neighbours. Mutation rate0.36 How often a copied meme changes into a new variant. Remix rate0.28 How often two visible variants combine into a new one. Novelty bias0.72 How strongly people prefer newer or surprising variants. Attention fatigue0.26 How quickly repeated variants lose their appeal. Selection strength0.62 How strongly more shareable variants outcompete weaker ones.

Applications

Cultural diffusion
Communication design
Marketing dynamics
Collective attention