A crazy idea has entered my head. I’ve always wanted to be a writer. Why? That’s where the ideas of a culture/person go when they want to gain a mass audience. Or rather, that’s where they used to go.

If you think about memes as independant entities, you can imagine that they sit down and play poker every once in a while and talk about the best ways to replicate themselves. They use existing modes of transportation (spoken language) to build new modes of transportation (the book). After a while, the book becomes a better mode of transportation than speaking and so the main bulk of the really important ground-breaking communication moves to books. And it stayed there for a long time. Maybe until television and movies came along. But because the group of book memes was once so powerful, it also tried to defend itself from being replaced by the visual broadcast medium. Near the end of the book’s legacy, they really pumped up the quality of creativity that was happening and all the classics from the 16th century (Shakespeare) through the 19th century, and the 20th century was arguably a century when the book meme lobbyists made us think that nothing had changed, and we continued to strive for the power that books had in the previous centuries. But something had changed. People were no longer reading books as their primary vehicle for information and ideas. They were now watching television.

Hence the decline in the importance of books even though the production of books (which continued to become easier and cheaper) was still increasing. But when books stopped being read by everyone (you couldn’t talk about that year’s most popular books at a party and expect everyone to have read them… which I think was much more likely to happen in the 19th century and earlier, at least in literate societies), then there came a negative feedback loop that led some authors and idea-makers away from books as their primary distribution model. Memes diverted into the television and movie mediums and flourished there.

What I’m wondering now is if software is the next medium that memes will inhabit. This entry by Tim Bray called Language Fermentation, combined with my instincts about how technology is going to change this world in the next 50 years, make me think that programming languages, along with the distributed bottom-up evolution of applications and ideas, will carry the biggest ideas of the 21st century. Not movies. Programs. Sound like hype to me, and maybe just a bit of a programmer-centric view of the world (being a programmer myself, how convenient), but even after all my self-doubt filters have been applied to this theory, I think it still survives as a possibility. And one that would perhaps make me switch modes in my life goals… to move away from the structured text of fiction and to more aggressively focus on the structured text of code. Does anyone buy this?