A Memetic Approach To Chinese Short Messaging Service (SMS)

Recent years have seen the popularity and prevalence of the mobile-phone short messages in the wake of the fast development of the communication technology and the Internet. The Short Messaging Service (SMS), a form of rapid, cheap and convenient social communication, has been crowned as "the fifth media" after newspaper, broadcast, television and the Internet. Though the SMS is a perfect combination of interpersonal communication and mass communication, it has not received sufficient and intensive studies yet, especially from a memetic approach.Memetics is a new theory for interpreting cultural evolution. A meme, invented to suggest a theory analogy with genes, is a unit of cultural imitation, a self-propagating idea much like a biological or computer virus. The American Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary explains memes as "an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture". The SMS maintains a close relationship with meme as a transmission channel of information. Memes perform a vital function in enriching the SMS language quickly and efficiently.This thesis mainly discusses two ways of meme replication, namely, genotype and phenotype, in the SMS. Based on the adaptation theory proposed by Versehueren (2000), and enlightened by the theory of memes, this thesis attempts to analyze strong meme creation. Vast and various memes compete for survival in their living environment, and only those which have higher value in fidelity, fecundity and longevity have the chance to win out. Thus, in order to make an SMS a strong meme, the SMS writer must make negotiable choices to make it adapted well to its surroundings. In this thesis, we sort the primary contextual correlates of adaptability for strong memes into three categories: cognition, emotion and culture.In probing into the memetic phenomenon in the SMS, we hope that our research can provide a new perspective for the SMS research and offer some beneficial enlightenments and references for message writers as well.