by an EEG machine. This process not only helped companies to see if the taste, smell, sound or feeling about their products are appealing to us, it also helps them to find out what within the human psyche is desirable, enabling them to create products that we literally cannot resist. I can hear you thinking ‘that’s not a weapon that’s just those nice companies helping me to make better choices after a busy day at the office’. Let’s go a little further down the rabbit hole with the concept of ‘memes’. What’s a meme I hear some of you ask? That does sound a little bit dangerous! Well, a meme is a unit of cultural information. It is an idea, behaviour or a style, that spreads from person to person within a culture. Defined as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, a meme can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. A meme is stored in our brains. To illustrate let’s look at the acronym for Wives and Girlfriends of high-profile footballers; WAG. The term, first coined in 2006 at the World Cup has become a cultural idea, an aspirational lifestyle choice that has been taken on by many females. In their minds they take on aspects of the media role models in an attempt to get as close to that reality as is possible, some even believing in its attainability. Another more profound meme idea is that of a ‘metrosexual’, first originating in an article by Mark Simpson published on November 1994, in The Independent. Simpson wrote: “Metrosexual man, the single young man with a high disposable income, living or working in the city (because that’s where all the best shops are), is perhaps the most promising consumer market of the decade. In the Eighties he was only to be found inside fashion magazines such as GQ, in television advertisements for Levi’s jeans or in gay bars. In the Nineties, he’s everywhere and he’s going shopping”.The power of this meme cannot be underestimated because it embodies how a simple idea can take hold via the media and how, in a very short time, you can actually redefine expressions of human sexuality for purposes of commerce. By choosing men embodying metrosexuality to become high profile media icons, such as David Beckham, placing them in the media, and labeling them as such, men begin not only aspiring to be metrosexuals, but defining themselves as metrosexual. This is an example of cultural creation using memes that are transmitted by the media with some very seductive ideas, changing the way men and society view masculinity, which in effect has been deconstructed and reassembled creating a new consumerist man, somewhere between the homosexual and the heterosexual was born the metrosexual. Similar to the idea or meme of the ‘teenager’; an idea that prior to The Beatles era did not exist. Once again I hear many of you saying ‘yeah you have a point but that does
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