Imagine you’re on a social medium or even a dating site and you’re trying to
find people who share the same interests as you do. Usually such sites have
some fields where you can specify your interest, indicate what books or films
you like etc. If the site has a good algorithm it might indeed search for an
optimal alignment between your interests profile and that of others to identify
potential friends or partners. However, not everybody takes the time to fill
out such questionnaires and due to this lack of accurate input the results may
be less good than you expect.
There are however other sites, where people make electronic collections of
their interests, such as Tumblr, Stumbleupon and Pinterest.
Pinterest is a very interesting site for determining someone’s
psychological profile. On Pinterest people make collections of images
(including images with accompanying texts) of topics they are interested in or
like. This is excellent for psychological profiling, because it gives a great
visual overview of all interests in different categories a person might have.If Pinterest could be improved and enhanced in its functionality so that you could compare the degree of overlap in pins you have with somebody else, in principle you could be able to find people who share a maximum of interests with you and who could be potential friends.
In fact, your Pinterest collection is in a certain way your Memecard. Memes are elements of sets of beliefs, behaviours and ideas, which are typical for a certain cultural group and which can be easily spread among people. Religions for example are very strong memegroups or shared Memomes. But also political or sportive affiliation can make that you belong to a certain memegroup.
Each idea category typical for such a memegroup can be called a meme, in analogy to a gene.
A Memome can then be considered to be a subject's complete set of memes in analogy to a complete genome.
...
More of this chapter in my next book, which I have submitted for publication.
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