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Jim Robertson linked to this speculative Museum of Media History. Very interesting.

It postulates the development (by 2014) of an online newsgrid in which people subscribe to editors whose views are collated into highly personalized replacements for today's news media. It projects that for most people the result will be shallow, trivial and dominated by the most popular editors. In other words, people will continue to be fed the news they want to hear by bigoted fat-heads like Rush Limgaugh.

From another viewpoint, this will be just another playing field on which evolution plays out. Not biological evolution, which is extremely slow and essentially at a terminal point with the human species, but memetic evolution -- the development and Darwinian "natural selection" of ideas.

Interestingly, in this month's Technology Review magazine (March, 2005), Freeman Dyson has an article ("The Darwinian Interlude", p. 27) in which he claims that biotechnology is at the point of returning evolution to the high-speed modes used prior to the development of species; namely by "horizontal gene transfer" between individual microbes. Of course, species will continue to exist, but biotech makes it possible to efficiently transfer genes between species, thereby accelerating their evolution.

So how does this relate to the evolution of memes? I would speculate that memetic evolution has so far been essentially the development of memetic species, characterized by the various religions and ideologies of the world. Up to now, there has been little transfer of memes between them, because of factors such as geography that have isolated the adherents of each memetic specie. But with the advent of the Internet, that isolation has become much easier to breach, making it much easier for memes to be transfered. And this is in spite of bigoted fat-heads who try to take advantage of the new media.

In any case, only those memes and meme species that are best adapted to the changing world will survive, and that doesn't necessarily those that have survived the longest so far.

An aside, if you're not too sure what evolution is really all about (in spite of what the bigoted fat-heads say about it), I would recommend the book What Evolution Is by Ernst Mayr, ISBN: 0-465-04426-3.