Meme units
Meme units are information clusters on different levels of abstraction that represent all memes. This is an extended representation of the knowledge pyramid. Memes are contents that are created and/or thought by humans and expressed, processed, and stored with meme units. Meanings can be added or lost on each hierarchic level. This is a reason for communication troubles and misinterpretations. Conscious consideration of the levels and their interpretations improve communication.
Meme units consist of five hierarchic levels: Token, data, information, knowledge, and wisdom.
- Token
are sense-perceptible attractions that have informational content or get meaning assigned, for example, characters, light or sound signals, and the like. The binary token system consists of the characters 1 and 0. The clustering of the token creates on different levels more and more complex meaning.
- Data
consists of bundles of tokens that take place during transmissions. This can be sensor data or the sequence of ones and zeros (e.g., 00100111) in the data processing. Data is structured, processed, and corrected. Only the interpretation on other levels assigns the real meaning to the data.
- Information
consists of data, to which meaning is assigned through interpretation. The appropriate conversion creates information (e.g., 39) from the data. The link with additional information, e.g., the data originate from a thermometer used to measure a person's temperature, the unit is centigrade, … leads to the information that this person has a fever. Additional meanings result from these insights on further levels.
- Knowledge
is the mixture of a lot of information that is collected over time and mentally connected. Thus, a physician can pull from the symptoms' conclusions, engage for further investigations, and introduce countermeasures (39 degrees fever - leg compresses). Through the continuous accumulation of information, knowledge continuously develops and changes over time.
- Wisdom
occurs when knowledge creates convictions that enable smart decisions and evaluations in complex situations, even if not all, information is available. If the physician finds an open wound, he diagnoses blood poisoning with the measured temperature that requires completely different treatment than a cold.
Depending upon the level of attention, the observer comes to other insights, i.e., meanings. A project manager can conclude that in a project, everything is all right since he received all data; or that the information is entirely available; or that a work package will not be finished in time; or that the project is endangered because an essential component was already shifted several times.