Meme Tags and Community Mirrors:Moving from Conferences to Collaboration

Richard Borovoy, Fred Martin, Sunil Vemuri,Mitchel Resnick, Brian Silverman, and Chris Hancock

MIT Media Laboratory20 Ames Street

Cambridge, MA 02139 USA+1 617 253 0331

{borovoy, fredm, vemuri, mres, bss, ch}@media.mit.edu

ABSTRACTMeme Tags are part of a body of research on Group-Wear: a wearable technology that supports people in theformative stages of cooperative work. Conferenceparticipants wear Meme Tags that allow them toelectronically share memes—succinct ideas oropinions—with each other. Alongside of the person-to-person transactions, a server system collects informationabout the memetic exchanges and reflects it back to theconference-goers in Community Mirrors—large, publicvideo displays that present real-time visualizations ofthe unfolding community dynamics. This paper presentsresults from a proof-of-concept trial of the Meme Tagtechnology undertaken at a MIT Media Laboratory con-ference.

Keywordsgroupware, name tag, community, meme, collaboration,wearable computing, infrared communication, interact-ion design

INTRODUCTIONA new type of collaborative technology, calledGroupWear, supports people in the formative stages ofcooperative work. We are specifically interested in theconference-type setting, where people united by acommon interest meet to share ideas, renew friendships,and forge new collaborations.

Our work is partly motivated by the irony that as CSCWresearchers, we spend a lot of time at conferences, yetwe have seen little use of CSCW ideas or technologiesto help make this time more productive. This may bebecause time spent interacting with others at con-ferences is not considered cooperative work: conferenceinteractions are somewhat evanescent, and a sharedagenda is often not articulated. However, we believe

that the groundwork for meaningful and enduring collab-orations can be laid at such events, and that this can beencouraged with appropriate technology.

As a starting point for our research, we look to the wear-able “paper and stick-pin” technology that is ubiquitousat every conference—the name tag. Judging by theirpopularity, name tags work very well as they are. There-fore, as we have developed our GroupWear Tags, wehave been very careful not to break what was good aboutthe name tag [2]. Our GroupWear Tags have two majorcapabilities that paper and stick-pin technology cannotsupport, however.

GroupWear Tags are about understanding relation-ships. While a normal name tag tells you somethingabout its wearer, GroupWear tags can tell you somethingyour relationship to the wearer. For example, the originalGroupWear tags [1] offered two conversing people asimple measure of their agreement on a set ofcommunity-relevant issues. This type of relationshipfeedback can be an excellent “bootstrap” into aconversation for building a shared understanding with anew acquaintance.

GroupWear Tags are about understanding commu-nity. Our latest GroupWear tags, called Meme Tags(Figure 1), go further by helping people build a sharedunderstanding of the whole conference community. Inorder for participants to build effective collaborationswith others, they need to be able to understand thestructure and dynamics of this community, and be ableto locate themselves and others in it. People also needto be encouraged to more freely associate with a widerspectrum of individuals.

This paper presents a proof-of-concept trial of the MemeTag technology undertaken at a conference at the MITMedia Laboratory. We start with an overview of theMeme Tag activity, a discussion of some of the designtradeoffs we had to make to support our goals, and someinformal observations of the effectiveness of thosechoices. We then present a more focused analysis ofsome of the quantitative data we collected at this event,and what it suggests about redesigning part of thetechnology. We conclude with some plans for future

Accepted for publication in theProceedings of the 1998 ACM Conference onComputer Supported Cooperative Work

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work, including a detailed study of the impact of theMeme Tags on cooperative activity.

Figure 1: The Meme Tag. Worn around the neck, theMeme Tag includes a large, bright LCD screen, greenand red pushbuttons (for accepting or deleting memes), aknob (not visible) for reviewing and choosing memes tooffer, and a bidirectional infrared communicationsdevice.

THE MEME TAG EVENTThe Meme Tag event took place over a period of twodays in October 1997. The event was designed to be apart of the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Life (DL), ThingsThat Think (TTT), and News In the Future (NIF)consortia sponsor meetings. Sponsors of the lab are invit-ed to see work at the lab, visit with faculty and students,meet with other sponsors, and pursue collaborations. Atthe event, approximately 400 sponsors, faculty, and stu-dents congregated and were each given a Meme Tag,which also functioned as their name tag.

Richard Dawkins first introduced the term “meme” tosuggest how ideas can spread and evolve through Dar-winian selection [4]. In our use, a meme is an idea oropinion, expressed as a short piece text that spreadsfrom person to person. The Meme Tag contains commu-nity-relevant memes that a participant has chosen.

Several weeks prior to the Meme Tag event, a web pagewas created to allow members of the Media Lab’sextended community to submit memes. Approximately400 memes were collected. A sample of approximately200 of these were chosen and each Meme Tag wasinitialized with one random meme. We ensured thateach of the 200 preselected memes was found on atleast one tag. Table 1 presents a sampling of memescontributed both before and during the event.

Sample Memes

If brute force isn’t working

you’re not using enough of it

We learn best from experience...

preferably someone else’s

Microsoft-Intel won’t last long.

Net computers are the future!!

History convinces more people

than philosophy

The future is best seen through

peripheral vision -- N.N.

Keyboards as we know them

will disappear by the year 2010

Content is a commodity ...

context is value added

Do not read the “Good Times”

meme

Don’t talk to me

Talk to my agent

This meme good for one free

dinner with Prof Michael Hawley

A witty saying...

proves nothing. -- Voltaire

Table 1: Sample Contributed Memes. Memes wererestricted to 64 characters each.

Once participants received their Meme Tags, they werefree to roam about the Media Lab and exchange memeswith fellow participants. In Figure 2, Bob and Nancymeet and their Meme Tags activate, lighting theirscreens. Bob’s tag presents a new meme to Nancy, whileNancy’s tag simultaneously presents a fresh meme toBob. For example, Nancy’s tag might say

Fresh meme for Bob:Computing should be aboutinsight, not numbers

while Bob’s tag displays

Fresh meme for Nancy:Make money fast --pass this meme to your friends!

If Bob likes the meme shown on Nancy’s tag, he canpress the green button on his tag, causing the meme tobe replicated onto his. Similarly, if Nancy wants themessage Bob’s tag has shown her, she can capture itonto her tag. After the exchange, the Meme Tagsbecome idle and do not distract from their subsequentconversation.

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Figure 2: Meme Exchange. “Bob” and “Nancy,” twoconference-goers at the Media Lab consortia meetings,exchange memes.

In addition to subscribing to memes from other people,participants were able to author their own memes at akiosk and add them to their tags (Figure 3). When aparticipant wearing a tag approached the kiosk, thekiosk recognized that a Meme Tag was near, and greet-ed the participant by name. From the kiosk, participantscould then add a meme to their badge. Approximately300 memes were added to the original set of 200 duringthe event.

Figure 3: Kiosk Usage. A participant authors a newmeme and adds it to his tag.

Around the event, large-screen displays presented visual-izations of how the memes spread throughout thecommunity (Figure 4). These displays formed a “Com-munity Mirror,” where in real-time participants sawwhich ideas were most popular and which ones weredying out, as well as information about group dynamics,such as the “cliquishness” of the gathering.

These Community Mirrors also gave participants a senseof knowing what other participants knew. This facilitatedthe formative stages of interaction by providing people

with additional common reference points for conversa-tion. Figure 5 shows four of the ten different visualiza-tions offered by the Community Mirror; these visualiza-tions cycled in rapid succession continuously throughoutthe event.

Figure 4: The Community Mirror. A large-screendisplay shows a series of visualizations based on real-time interaction data, reflecting a representation of socialactivity back to event participants.

The final piece of the Meme Tag System was the MemeServer Database (Figure 6). In addition to storing all ofthe meme text and meme subscription information, theserver also stored basic demographic information oneach participant: gender, affiliation (sponsor, faculty,student), and consortium (DL, TTT, NIF). This informa-tion was used for the Community Mirrors as well as forour post-event data analysis.

Each time participants met, their Meme Tags created arecord indicating who met and what memes wereexchanged (or rejected). During the participants’ conver-sation, the Meme Tags also invisibly shared records ofall other conversations they knew about—that is, notonly conversations in which they were involved, butconversations they learned about “through the grape-vine” from other tags. Thus, each Meme Tag collected asample of the conversation records from throughout theentire community.

When a participant visited a kiosk, the kiosk down-loaded the interaction records and sent them to theMeme Server Database. Because each participant’sMeme Tag contained a representative sample of conver-sation records from the entire group, only a fraction ofthe participants needed to visit kiosks in order for theMeme Server to collect a substantial portion of all con-versation records. This decentralized mechanismallowed the Meme Server to collect live communitydata from purely local interactions.

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Figure 5: Four Examples of Community Mirror Visualizations.

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Meme ServerDatabase

Meme Tag Meme Tag

1

UserKiosk

Meme Tag

2 3

Community Mirror4

ConversationMeme Tag System DesignWhen two people meet , their Meme Tags offer each other a new Meme and also exchange transaction records from prior conversations. When an individual visits a User Kiosk to add a new meme, the transaction records are uploaded and transmitted to the Meme Server Database . The Community Mirror Display retrieves data from the Meme Server and creates a series of visualizations of memetic activity.

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2

3

4

Figure 6: Meme Tag System Design.

RELATED RESEARCHOur original GroupWear tags, called Thinking Tags,helped two conference participants build a shared under-standing by showing them a measure of their agreementon some community-relevant issues [1]. At a ThinkingTag event, participants programmed their tags withanswers to several multiple-choice questions. When twoparticipants met, their tags flashed a green light for eachquestion they agreed upon and a red light for eachquestion they answered differently.

Unlike the design of the Meme Tag activity, ThinkingTag content had to be determined in advance of theevent—there was no way for participants to add newissues as the event progressed. Also, the Thinking Tagsdid not have any support for visualizations of communityactivity like the Meme Tags’ Community Mirrors.

Our GroupWear research continues the emerging CSCWtrend toward support for the more informal, unstructured,and unplanned aspects of the collaborative process [10,13]. Also, like the Xerox PARC work on Collab andLiveBoard, our research aims to augment face-to-facework [16, 7]. We have worked hard to weave the Group-Wear tags into the social fabric of a normal conference,heeding Moran, et al’s warning that the tools should not“inhibit or distort” people’s natural collaborative

activities [12]. To this end, we have insured “alignment”between GroupWear mechanics and normal groupdynamics: when two people face each other at normalconversational distance, their tags interact; also, tagoutput is designed to be easily comprehensible withinthe time and space constraints of regular social inter-actions.

Unlike other research on face-to-face CSCW, Group-Wear attempts to augment the collaborative work thatgoes on before collaborative work is formally acknow-ledged—before any project meetings have taken place,a team has been established, or a shared vision has beenarticulated. GroupWear technology is designed to helpparticipants at a conference find like-minded indivi-duals, and begin conversations that can lay the ground-work for further collaboration. Although people spend alot of time engaged in this type of face-to-face activity,we know of no other technology designed to support it.

GroupWear Community Mirrors support a type of “socialgroup awareness,” another strong theme in CSCWresearch. Dourish and Bellotti’s definition of awareness[6] is “the understanding of the activity of the others,which provides a context of your own activity.” Commu-nity Mirrors do this by letting participants view their ownsocial activity in the context of community dynamics

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(for instance, “The average person has met fifteenpeople, but I’ve spoken with only six”). We also extendthe definition of awareness to include understanding ofthe knowledge and beliefs of others, in order to providecontext for one’s own knowledge and beliefs. Commu-nity Mirrors let participants examine the beliefs of othersby allowing them to see statistics such as a particularmeme’s current popularity within the community.

Community Mirrors offer viewers knowledge of otherpeople’s knowledge (specifically, knowledge of thecollective beliefs of a community), allowing them toserve as a partial solution to the “Mutual KnowledgeProblem.” Krauss and Fussell characterize this problemas the work communicating parties must do in“constructing their common cognitive environment—thatis, ascertaining and representing the information thatthey and the other participants can (and will) assume tobe known to all.” [11]

Because Community Mirrors are displayed in full publicview, and people can assume that most people haveseen them, they reflect a gathering’s common cognitiveenvironment, in terms of a set of shared beliefs, andshared knowledge of these shared beliefs. This know-ledge, shared by the community about the community,can then be a powerful resource for individual conversa-tion. By locating themselves within this space, partici-pants in a conversation can begin to build a more per-sonal shared understanding that can lead to continuedcollaboration.

The Community Mirrors feed back visualizations ofcommunity dynamics in real-time to a co-present com-munity. Real-time community visualizations have beenpreviously explored for on-line communities [5]. Also,sociologists engaged in Social Network Analysis haveproduced many interesting representations of real-worldcommunity activity [15]. However, their representationswere not available for the real-time consumption of theirsubject community.

DESIGN DECISIONSDuring the design of the Meme Tag event, the objectwas to ensure that the activity and technology facilitatedmeaningful interaction between participants that couldlead to further collaboration. All of the following designdecisions follow from this purpose.

Tag DesignHow many memes per tagThough there were over 300 memes circulating duringthe event, the Meme Tags were restricted to hold amaximum of seven memes. This was not a technicalrestriction, since there was enough free memory in theMeme Tags to hold many more memes. Rather, wewanted participants to have a sense that the space ontheir Meme Tag was precious. By restricting the numberof memes, people needed to be selective in acceptingmemes. (Participants could delete memes to make roomfor new ones they found more interesting.) Furthermore,by restricting space on the tags, we hoped to find inter-esting global trends in meme popularity.

Initializing tags with memesIn order to bootstrap the event, each tag was initializedwith one meme. By seeding participants’ tags withmemes, people could start exchanging memes imme-diately without having to go to a kiosk to enter a newmeme. However, it was extremely important that peoplefeel a bond with their tags [2], which could be lessenedby the presence of random content. Nevertheless, with-out a substantial pool of memes in circulation from thebeginning, the activity might not have been able to getstarted. As a compromise, tags were initialized withexactly one random meme.

As another way to bootstrap the event, we placed largeposters with Meme Tags attached to them. These special“Poster Tags” had several memes in them. Participantscould walk up to the poster and receive a meme fromthe poster tag. In this way, people could easily seed theirtags with memes of their own choosing before joiningthe social activity.

Meme ExchangesIdentityAs part of the design of the Meme Tag, two tags withininfrared communications range start an exchange bydisplaying a greeting that included the name of theconversation partner. This was important because in agroup of more than two people, it made clear which twoMeme Tags were interacting by creating a visibleconnection between conversation partners.

Which Meme to OfferAfter the greeting, each tag selected a meme to offer theother. We considered different methods for the MemeTag to computationally determine which would be thebest meme to offer in an exchange. Proposals includedusing a collaborative filtering algorithm to determinewhich among a given set of memes would be mostrelevant. After some debate, we concluded that memeselection would appear fairly arbitrary regardless of themethod, since the interface could not reveal the selec-tion process. The final design attempted to presentpersons with a meme from their conversation partner’stag that they had not seen before. As such, the choice ofmeme was based on both participants’ history: one hadsubscribed to the meme, and the other had not yetencountered it.

In trial runs, some users wanted to evangelize a specificmeme or carefully choose a particular meme for a col-league. So, a feature was added that would allow a userto offer a specific meme: by turning the knob on the tagto a specific meme, that meme would be offered in thesubsequent exchange.

Double InteractionsTo ensure that when a pair of tags finished an exchange,they did not start another one immediately, a featurewas added that prevented a tag from initiating an ex-change with the same tag twice in a row. However, inearly user interface tests, people sometimes wanted toinitiate a second session with the same person. The de-sign was modified to allow people to reset their tags by

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pressing the red button. Though this overloaded the redbutton to mean both “delete a meme” and “reset thetag,” the added feature proved valuable to power users.

Design of the Community MirrorsShowing the whole memeThe purpose of the Community Mirrors was to convey avariety of information about the event in real time toevent participants. Included within these displays werethe actual text of the memes. In the initial design, theentire text of the meme was not displayed. We reasonedthat if people had seen a meme on a Community Mirrorbefore they encountered it from a fellow participant, thememe might be less intriguing and their reaction to itwould be muted. However, participants found the dis-plays confusing without the entire text of the meme.Therefore, we reversed this decision in favor of showingthe entire meme in the Community Mirror and kiosks.

RESULTSThe focus of this pilot study was on getting the techno-logy working, not on collecting detailed data on its useand impact. However, the data that the Meme Tagsthemselves collected tells us something about the suc-cess of the project. During the course of the event, the400 participants collectively hit their green buttons tosubscribe to a meme approximately 2000 times. Also,during the event, 147 different people took the time togo to a kiosk and author, on average, two new memeseach. This data paints a picture of a gathering that wasfairly engaged with the Meme Tag activity.

Unfortunately, due to a software bug, the Meme Tagsrelayed only about 45% of the transaction data to theserver, where a transaction consisted of a meme offerbetween two people, a meme acceptance, or a memedeletion. Although we were disappointed with this out-come, we eventually came to regard the data glass ashalf full, rather than half empty. The networking algor-ithm we designed for the Meme Tags was complex, andthis was our first opportunity to test it with a large groupof people over an extended period of time. Furthermore,we could find no reason to believe there was anyselection bias in the data that was captured. Therefore,we believe the Community Mirrors—and our furtheranalysis here—were based on a representative samplingof the data.

In addition to the above quantitative data, we have acollection of informal observations and anecdotes relat-ing to the impact of the Meme Tags.

Compellingness of a Meme Tag Personal Greet ingWhen one of the conference speakers concluded hisspeech and walked up the aisle to the exit, hepurposefully shielded his tag with his hand. It seemedclear that this was to avoid the potentially awkwardsituation of his tag “striking up” an unwanted interactionwith a member of the audience. Many people told usthey found the Meme Tag introduction protocol—wherea Meme Tag on a person you are facing lights up with asalutation that includes your name—extremely engag-ing, almost to the point of distraction. One person said

that if they walked past someone and their tagsinadvertently started to interact, it was hard to resiststopping and talking when he saw his name lit up on theother person’s tag.

Of course, it is highly ironic that finding one’s name onsomeone else’s name tag is compelling. Conventionalwisdom would say that this is the last thing anyoneneeds to see on someone else’s name tag, since we allknow our own names. There is something more importanthappening here. Part of the salutation’s significance isthat it demonstrates to Meme Tag viewers that whatthey are seeing has been created just for them. It hints atfulfillment of the childhood fantasy world that is totallyconstructed for one’s own viewing pleasure.

More importantly, the Meme Tag personal salutationseemed to have the power to create what Goffmancalled a “focused interaction” between two people,which involves “individuals who extend one another aspecial type of mutual activity that can exclude otherswho are present in the situation” [9]. In fact, wedesigned the Meme Tag software to ensure that oneMeme Tag would seek out a single other one, andexclude other tags in the vicinity. We did not want oneperson’s tag starting an interaction with several others’tags at once, leading to multiple meme offers andsubsequent confusion about which meme might beaccepted by pressing the green button.

Goffman describes an elaborate human protocol fornegotiating focused interactions, that includes suchrituals as third party introductions of two people whohave something in common. In some ways, the MemeTags enacted this protocol by choosing two people in agroup and lighting up their tags with memetic contentdrawn from one and personalized for the other. Whetherthis is too much power to give to a name tag is worthy offurther consideration.

Technology as FashionBefore anyone could use the Meme Tags to help formcollaborations, we saw that they had to overcome aconceptual hurdle. Some people had a hard time dealingwith the fact that although they were the ones wearingthis small computer, its LCD screen was designed pri-marily to be viewed by other people. In fact, severalMedia Lab members demonstrated difficulty with thisconcept: in a brainstorming session on possible MemeTag uses, they repeatedly suggested applications, suchas using them as pagers, for which they were not wellsuited. Of course, Meme Tags are unusual in the worldof technology, where pagers, PDAs, and cell phones thatwe carry are designed to be looked at primarily by us.

Over time, however, as participants looked at the tags ofthe others, they seemed to get more comfortable withthe idea that their tag was meant for others to view. Infact, this is a communicative model with which we areall familiar: namely, fashion. Fashion is about wearingthings that communicate something about us to others[3]. In some ways, the Meme Tag is another type ofwearable display like a neck-tie, a piece of jewelry, or a

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T-shirt with text on it. Of course, the Meme Tag has thespecial ability to change its appearance depending onwho is viewing it. We believe people will becomeincreasingly comfortable with this model of “interperson-alizable” hi-tech fashion.

TestimonialsWe got a lot of feedback like the following part of an e-mail from one participant, who wrote asking if he couldkeep his tag after we asked sponsors to return them: “Inall of the conferences that I have attended and produced,the meme tag is the most unique and high-tech solutionto a low tech-problem: getting random people to connectand converse with each other.” Other people also told usthe Meme Tags helped them have meaningful inter-actions with others that they otherwise might not have.

We have little hard data on the impact of the Commu-nity Mirrors. We know that many people stood aroundand watched the displays as the visualizations streamedpast. One faculty member reported talking to a sponsorwho kept glancing over at the display. At one point, thesponsor suddenly stood up, pulled out a camera, andtook a picture of the Community Mirror. He told thefaculty member that one of his memes had made it tothe “Most Popular Memes” list, and that he wanted tobe able to show this to his friends at home. A much morethorough study of the impact of the Community Mirrorswill be undertaken in a future study.

A NEXT GENER AT ION OF COM MUNI TY MI RR ORSDesigning the original Community Mirrors turned out tobe a bootstrapping problem. Part of the reason forbuilding the Meme Tags in the first place was thatpeople—including ourselves—do not have goodintuitions about community dynamics. Therefore, wewere in the position of building visualizations for a dataset that we could barely imagine. We relied on ourintuitions and on relevant research [13] to come up withthe first set of visualizations. Now, however, having runa large-scale event and collected a set of interactiondata, we can propose a set of views based on interestingpatterns in the data. The following sections sketch thecontent of some of these views, without presenting thespecifics of the visualizations.

InsularityDuring our work on GroupWear, one of the complaintswe have heard is that organizations will go to greatlengths to bring a diverse set of people together, only tosee them interact with the small subset of people thatthey see every day. This pattern of behavior was evidentin our Meme Tag data (Figure 7). The graph shows theamount of face-to-face interactions that occurred bet-ween members of the same group (i.e., sponsors, faculty,and students). Each group’s data is displayed as the ratiobetween the number of interactions that occurred and thenumber that would occur if people were mixing random-ly (i.e., without bias toward interacting with particulargroups). Therefore, the line at 100% represents what thevalues would be if there were no insular bias. As one cansee, sponsors have the smallest tendency toward insular-

ity, while students have the largest—they are twice aslikely to interact with another student as they would beif they mixed randomly.

Insularity: Within-Group Interactions as a Percentage of Expectation

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

120%

140%

160%

180%

200%

Sponsors Faculty Students

Figure 7: Insularity Between Groups.

Since insularity can have a negative impact on theinitiation of useful new collaborations, we would like tohighlight it in future GroupWear Community Mirrors. Ofcourse, we are not trying to interfere with the Constitu-tion’s guaranteed right to freedom of association. Thereare times when people may want to be insular. However,research suggests that group behavior like insularity canoccur despite the wishes of individual group members[14]. This could occur if people had a slight personalpreference toward insularity, and no sense of how theiractions were contributing to an undesirable trend. ACommunity Mirror could make this trend visible, helpingpeople link their own choices to this otherwise invisiblemacro behavior. Furthermore, because of the publicnature of the Community Mirror, insular groups will alsobe able to see that other people can see their behavior.This is in contrast to the perceived invisibility of in-dividual interactions in a group situation. These twofactors could contribute to a shift in an individual’sperceived trade-off between insular and non-insular be-havior. This matter will be taken up in future GroupWearresearch.

A word about statistical significance: The insularity biasis statistically significant, with p<0.01. However, it isimportant to keep in mind that these graphs are notmeant to provide an after-the-fact, statistically signifi-cant sociological analyses of the event. Rather, they areleading us to design new visualizations whose signifi-cance will be rightfully determined by the participantswho will be able to discuss them as they unfold in real-time at a future Meme Tag event.

Communities of BelieversCommunities are partially constituted by the set ofbeliefs they hold in common [8]. Sub-groups within acommunity will share some beliefs, but divide on others.Identifying these “belief communities” at a conference

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gathering, and locating oneself and others within them,could be helpful for identifying potential collaborators,establishing common ground, and creating a sense ofgroup identity.

By putting the memes into thematic categories, we wereable to analyze various Media Lab groups’ predispos-ition to subscribe to certain types of memes. Thisanalysis is somewhat costly to include in the Commu-nity Mirror because it would require human attentionduring the progress of an event. For memes that wereadded during an event, someone—either the memeauthor or someone behind the scenes—would have tocategorize them.

Many of the disparities between different groups’ sub-scription rates to different types of memes were telling.For example, Figure 8 shows that Digital Life sponsorshad a larger percentage of subscriptions than Things ThatThink sponsors to memes that sounded a cautionary noteabout technology (e.g., “New does not equal good. Moredoes not equal better”). This is in keeping with theDigital Life Consortium’s focus on looking at technologyin a broader, human context, and not just liking it for itsown sake. Both groups had roughly equal percentage ofsubscriptions to memes with explicit technical content,however, showing that Digital Life sponsors are certainlynot technophobes. A Community Mirror that paired suchgraphs showing disparity and commonality betweengroups could be very powerful tool to help establish ashared sense of individual consortia identities in thecontext of a larger Media Lab identity. Once again, thisshared understanding would be very useful starting pointfor collaborations.

Subscriptions to “Cautionary Technology” Memes by Consortium

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2.0%

3.0%

4.0%

5.0%

6.0%

7.0%

8.0%

9.0%

10.0%

Digital Life Things That Think

Figure 8: Cautionary Technology Subscriptions byPercentage of Total.

The variance in popularity of “Self-Referential” memesamong different Media Lab groups was also revealing.These were memes that were explicitly about memes, orabout the meme tag activity. Some examples were “Thisis not a Meme” and “Make money fast. Pass this meme

to your friends.” Figure 9 shows that sponsors foundthese memes less appealing than faculty, who in turnfound them less interesting than students. This datasupports the stereotype that sponsors prefer ideas that areabout the real world, whereas academics are moreinterested in ideas about ideas and students appear to bethe most invested in this kind of metaphysical contem-plation. By presenting such a graph at a future event, wewould hope people would think about these patterns andtheir relationships to them.

0.0%

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8.0%

10.0%

12.0%

14.0%

16.0%

18.0%

20.0%

Group Subscriptions to “Self-Referential” Memes

Sponsors Faculty Students

Figure 9: Group Subscriptions to Self-ReferentialMemes by Percentage of All Group Subscrip tions.

Not all visualizations would perpetuate stereotypes. Forexample, although one might predict some gender dif-ferences in terms of memetic taste, the data does notsupport it. Categories such as “attempt at humor,”“techie,” “self-referential,” “cautionary about techno-logy”—any category we looked at—showed no signifi-cant gender-based preferences. Even if they had,however, what would it mean? We believe very stronglythat the community in which these visualizations areembedded should determine their meaning. The real-time nature of these visualization is important because itkeeps them within the “hermaneutic circle” of those par-ticipating in the event: they get to decide the signifi-cance of what they see, and whether it should impacttheir behavior.

CONCLUSIONOur informal observations suggest that the proof-of-concept trial of the Meme Tags was successful. Peopleenthusiastically used the tags through both days of theevent, and even through dinner on the first night. TheKiosks were in fairly constant use through both days,with people lining up to author memes that they hopedwould reach the “big board” (the Community Mirror).Several people told us that the Meme Tags helped themfeel comfortable about approaching people they other-wise would not have. Finally, although we asked for thetags back, many people asked to keep them as conversa-tional props to explain the event to their colleagues.

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We also found some flaws in the activity. Probably themost significant was people’s seeming lack of attach-ment to the memes in their tags. Often, we saw thatpeople did not really know what memes they owned.Also, the data showed that no memes really reached a“mass audience”—the maximum number of people thatsubscribed to any one meme was about forty (we cannotdetermine this exactly due to the previously mentioneddata loss).

Rigorous study of the hypotheses discussed in this paperwere beyond of the scope of our initial study. However,now that we have the technology operating and haveseen its potential power, we are applying what welearned to the design of a more methodical study. Whilewe will not vary the technology greatly, we areinterested experimenting with a different context. Wewould like to see how the Meme Tags work at a morenarrowly focused intellectual gathering, such as a smallacademic conference. We believe such an environmentmight offer a more focused meme pool, and result instronger bonds between memes and participants. Thisshould provide us with the opportunity to further test theimpact of the Meme Tags and Community Mirrors onthe early stages of collaborative activity.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSWe are grateful for the contributions of Walter Bender,Michael Best, Vanessa Colella, Austina DeBonte,Judith Donath, Will Glesnes, Kwin Kramer, LewisNeiboh, Andrew Lippman, Linda Lowe, BakhtiarMikhak, Carol Novitsky, Artemis Papert, RebeccaPrendergast, David Williamson Shaffer, Andrew Shalit,Sindhu Srinivas, Sean Sutherland, Deb Widener, andFlorence Williams.

This project was funded in part by the Media Labora-tory’s Things That Think, News in the Future, andDigital Life consortia. Hewlett-Packard donated infraredtransceivers used in each of the Meme Tags. DuracellCorp. donated several thousand AA alkaline batteries topower the event.

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