Once upon a time I asked my brother-in-law what the word for the kind of email that gets sent around--the kind that no one knows who started it or who wrote it, usually funny as hell, often apocryphal, not necessarily jokes, etc.. --he paused and answered “
Meme”. I laughed.
Meme was not the word I was looking for, but it started me thinking. I really, really didn’t want to write a Blog about Meme’s (really), but…how long could I leave such a hot topic unblogged? Maybe, according to the selfish meme (sic) theory, I didn’t ever have a chance. This is what I came up with:
A
gene is a unit of heredity encoded in DNA and passed on through reproduction, but also can be passed between un-related individuals via viruses (paraphrased from Wikipedia).
A
meme is a unit of a self-propagating unit of cultural evolution encoded in a behavior “imitation” and can be passed between unrelated individuals via a virus—language.
TANGENT: “Language is a Virus” wasn’t the complete quote, it was “Language is
a virus sent from outer space”, but it’s a lot more apropos without that last bit. It was good old William S. Burroughs who apparently said that (it’s all over the internet without a source) and the original performance artist Laurie Anderson who spread it, with a song title of the same (on the soundtrack for
Home of the Brave).
To continue:
"Genes that do x are more likely to be passed on" (
Susan Blackmore discussing
Richard Dawkins)
"Successful
meme are the ones that get copied and spread, while unsuccessful ones do not". ( ibid)
TANGENT: Since Richard Sermon, a German evolutionary biologist was the first to use the concept of “meme” in 1902; and Danish botanist Wilhelm Johannsen didn’t coin the word "gene" until 1909; meme’s precede gene’s in cultural evolution (if only by seven years). source: Wikipedia definition of Meme
The idea of the gene is a meme, but a meme is not a gene, it is like a gene, which means it is a metaphor, which means it is a feature of language, and language is a virus, which is memetic, therefore a meme IS a gene. What?
1 comment:
Here's the thing: It's fine to informally think of emails that duplicate themselves as "memes," but this risks losing some of the useful associations of the term "meme." More specifically an email that's out there reproducing is one form of a "replicator." An idea that propogates is another kind of replicator, and that's what we call a "meme." Memes, like emails, can use a variety of methods for inducing us humans to pass them on. Some memes are passed because they teach us how to do something useful, but some are just catchy ideas or phrases, like "wake up and smell the coffee." Some memes give you a new way of understanding something you already know about, hopefully one that lets you accomplish new goals. Those are my favorite.
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