Knowledge media and meme media architectures from the viewpoint of the phenotype-genotype mapping

Abstract

Media to externalize some knowledge as knowledge resources for their sharing among people across time and space are generally defined as 'knowledge media'. Distribution of knowledge resources sooner or later forms a huge accumulation of knowledge shared by our society, which activates the reediting and redistribution of knowledge resources, and accelerates their memetic evolution. Meme media are knowledge media with reeding and redistribution functions. Each knowledge consists of its code and mode. The code defines the knowledge itself, while the mode defines the presentation details. For each externalized knowledge, we call its code its genotype, and its external representation including its mode its phenotype. Electronic information media have enabled us to edit multimedia documents through direct manipulation on a WYSIWYG editor. We may consider a similar editor to edit not only multimedia documents but also compound documents with embedded tools and services. The editing denotes the recombination of contents on some medium through direct manipulation. Each recombination of contents should be represented as a phenotype manipulation that defines the corresponding recombination of the genotype representation. In this paper, we will propose a new interpretation of knowledge media and meme media. This will clarify the essential mechanism from the view point of the 'phenotype-genotype mapping'. We will use this interpretation to review the meme media architecture, and to reformulate how the meme-media architecture can be applied to the Web to make it work as a meme pool.