The word “meme” has taken on a life of its own in the age of social media, but it stems from the concept of “mimetic theory,” which says (in essence) that our desires are generally borrowed from other people, rather than being reflective of intrinsic needs or wants.
In other words, we don’t desire expensive sports cars, nights out on the town, and partners with specific physical and mental attributes because we were born wanting those things: we want them because we see other people want them and because we’re told we’re supposed to want them by other humans and by cultural artifacts like billboards, books, and movies.
Within the larger world of mimetic theory (and the tangle of concepts it touches and influences) is another idea called “generation loss,” which refers to the tendency of copies to be of a lower quality compared to the original.
This is true of digital images, as copies of copies of copies of a photo will be blurrier and riddled with visual artifacts compared to the original, and it’s true of information, as well, as is evidenced by the “telephone” game that has a group of people pass a phrase from individual to individual, that phrase almost always changing along the way due to slow (but nearly inevitable) degradation of the communication signal.
In some contexts this issue has been referred to as the “Xerox effect” because of the tendency of photocopies to reproduce things imperfectly, and the tendency of photocopies of photocopies to be still-further degraded.
This term is used across many realms of inquiry, from the world of biology (where it gestures at the degradation we see in genetic messaging from generation to generation of living things) to the world of education, where it’s generally applied to success metrics and methods that are ritually replicated over time, but because they’re later applied within a context different from the one in which they were initially innovated, those later versions tend to demonstrate debased outcomes.
Generation loss can also result in the forfeiture of what’s called “generational knowledge” when the wisdom and know-how accumulated by a group of people is insufficiently shared or archived, the next generation not benefitting from those assets as a consequence.
Even knowledge and understandings that seem primed to stick around forever—committed to a book or website or video—can degrade with time, as books rot, websites disappear (or their links are changed), and videos lose their cultural resonance and are ignored in favor of more of-the-moment entertainments.
The data and meaning contained within such knowledge artifacts will then, with time, become photocopies of photocopies of photocopies, transmitted in some form to the next generation and the one after that, but often in a mutated form: the original hard-won learnings replaced with a bad Xerox of the same, that photocopy interpreted through the lens of the new context in which it exists, further changing its message.