Product Code Database
A meme (; ) is an idea, behavior, or style that Mimesis from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. Meme . Merriam-Webster Dictionary. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures. In popular language, a meme may refer to an Internet meme, typically an image, that is remixed, copied, and circulated in a shared cultural experience online.
Proponents theorize that memes are a viral phenomenon that may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution. Memes do this through processes analogous to those of variation, mutation, competition, and heredity, each of which influences a meme's reproductive success. Memes spread through the behavior that they generate in their hosts. Memes that fecundity less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate. Memes that replicate most effectively enjoy more success, and some may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the welfare of their hosts. "But if we consider culture as its own self-organizing system—a system with its own agenda and pressure to survive—then the history of humanity gets even more interesting. As Richard Dawkins has shown, systems of self-replicating ideas or memes can quickly accumulate their own agenda and behaviours. I assign no higher motive to a cultural entity than the primitive drive to reproduce itself and modify its environment to aid its spread. One way the self organizing system can do this is by consuming human biological resources."
A field of study called memetics arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model. Criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that academic study can examine memes . However, developments in neuroimaging may make empirical study possible. Some commentators in the social sciences question the idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units, and are especially critical of the biological nature of the theory's underpinnings. Others have argued that this use of the term is the result of a misunderstanding of the original proposal.
The word meme itself is a neologism coined by Richard Dawkins, originating from his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. "We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'." Dawkins's own position is somewhat ambiguous. He welcomed N. K. Humphrey's suggestion that "memes should be considered as living structures, not just metaphorically", and proposed to regard memes as "physically residing in the brain". Although Dawkins said his original intentions had been simpler, he approved Humphrey's opinion and he endorsed Susan Blackmore's 1999 project to give a scientific theory of memes, complete with predictions and empirical support.Dawkins's foreword to , p. xvi–xvii
The word was coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a concept for discussion of principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena.. "Richard Dawkins invented the term 'memes' to stand for items that are reproduced by imitation rather than reproduced genetically." Examples of memes given in Dawkins' book include melodies, , fashion, and the technology of building arches.
For instance, the possibility that ideas were subject to the same pressures of evolution as were biological attributes was discussed in the time of Charles Darwin. T. H. Huxley (1880) claimed that "The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals." G. K. Chesterton (1922) observed the similarity between intellectual systems and living organisms, noting that a certain degree of complexity, rather than being a hindrance, is a necessity for continued survival.
In 1904, Richard Semon published Die Mneme (which appeared in English in 1924 as The Mneme). The term mneme was also used in Maurice Maeterlinck's The Life of the White Ant (1926), with some parallels to Dawkins's concept. Kenneth Pike had, in 1954, coined the related terms emic and etic, generalizing the linguistic units of phoneme, morpheme, grapheme, lexeme, and tagmeme (as set out by Leonard Bloomfield), distinguishing insider and outside views of communicative behavior.
Dawkins cites as inspiration the work of geneticist L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, anthropologist F. T. Cloak,Cloak, F. T. 1966. "Cultural microevolution". Research Previews 13(2): 7–10. (Also presented at the November, 1966 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.)Cloak, F. T. 1975. "Is a cultural ethology possible?" Human Ecology 3: 161–182. . and ethologist J. M. Cullen." The Selfish Gene: Chapter 11 – Summary & Analysis ". LitCharts. Dawkins wrote that evolution depended not on the particular chemical basis of genetics, but only on the existence of a self-replicating unit of transmission—in the case of biological evolution, the gene. For Dawkins, the meme exemplified another self-replicating unit with potential significance in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution.
Dawkins used the term to refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a self-replication. He hypothesized that one could view many cultural entities as replicators, and pointed to melodies, fashions and learned skills as examples. Memes generally replicate through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient copiers of information and behavior. Because humans do not always copy memes perfectly, and because they may refine, combine or otherwise modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time. Dawkins likened the process by which memes survive and change through the evolution of culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution. Dawkins noted that in a society with culture a person need not have biological descendants to remain influential in the actions of individuals thousands of years after their death:
But if you contribute to the world's culture, if you have a good idea...it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G.C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong.
In that context, Dawkins defined the meme as a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation and replication, but later definitions would vary. The lack of a consistent, rigorous, and precise understanding of what typically makes up one unit of cultural transmission remains a problem in debates about memetics. In contrast, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the discovery of the biological functions of DNA. Meme transmission requires a physical medium, such as photons, sound waves, touch, taste, or smell because memes can be transmitted only through the senses.
Memes first need retention. The longer a meme stays in its hosts, the higher its chances of propagation are. When a host uses a meme, the meme's life is extended. The reuse of the neural space hosting a certain meme's copy to host different memes is the greatest threat to that meme's copy. A meme that increases the longevity of its hosts will generally survive longer. On the contrary, a meme that shortens the longevity of its hosts will tend to disappear faster. However, as hosts are mortal, retention is not sufficient to perpetuate a meme in the long term; memes also need transmission.
Life-forms can transmit information both vertically (from parent to child, via replication of genes) and horizontally (through viruses and other means). Memes can replicate vertically or horizontally within a single biological generation. They may also lie dormant for long periods of time.
Memes reproduce by copying from a nervous system to another one, either by communication or imitation. Imitation often involves the copying of an observed behavior of another individual. Communication may be direct or indirect, where memes transmit from one individual to another through a copy recorded in an inanimate source, such as a book or a Sheet music. Adam McNamara has suggested that memes can be thereby classified as either internal or external memes (i-memes or e-memes).
Some commentators have likened the transmission of memes to the spread of contagions.; "The term 'contagion' is often associated with memetics. We may say that certain memes are contagious, or more contagious than others." Social contagions such as Bandwagon effect, hysteria, copycat crime, and copycat suicide exemplify memes seen as the contagious imitation of ideas. Observers distinguish the contagious imitation of memes from instinctively contagious phenomena such as yawning and laughing, which they consider innate (rather than socially learned) behaviors.
Aaron Lynch described seven general patterns of meme transmission, or "thought contagion":
The meme as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless of whether that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme. A meme could consist of a single word, or a meme could consist of the entire speech in which that word first occurred. This forms an analogy to the idea of a gene as a single unit of self-replicating information found on the self-replicating chromosome.
While the identification of memes as "units" conveys their nature to replicate as discrete, indivisible entities, it does not imply that thoughts somehow become quantized or that "" ideas exist that cannot be dissected into smaller pieces. A meme has no given size. Susan Blackmore writes that melodies from Beethoven's symphonies are commonly used to illustrate the difficulty involved in delimiting memes as discrete units. She notes that while the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony () form a meme widely replicated as an independent unit, one can regard the entire symphony as a single meme as well.
The inability to pin an idea or cultural feature to quantifiable key units is widely acknowledged as a problem for memetics. It has been argued however that the traces of memetic processing can be quantified utilizing neuroimaging techniques which measure changes in the "connectivity profiles between brain regions". Blackmore meets such criticism by stating that memes compare with genes in this respect: that while a gene has no particular size, nor can we ascribe every phenotypic feature directly to a particular gene, it has value because it encapsulates that key unit of inherited expression subject to evolutionary pressures. To illustrate, she notes evolution selects for the gene for features such as eye color; it does not select for the individual nucleotide in a strand of DNA. Memes play a comparable role in understanding the evolution of imitated behaviors.
Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process (1981) by Charles J. Lumsden and E. O. Wilson proposes the theory that genes and culture co-evolve, and that the fundamental biological units of culture must correspond to neuronal networks that function as nodes of semantic memory. Lumsden and Wilson coined their own word, culturgen, which did not catch on. Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book , which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the Natural science and social sciences.
At present, the existence of discrete cultural units which satisfy memetic theory has been challenged in a variety of ways. What is critical from this perspective is that in denying memetics unitary status is to deny a particularly fundamental part of Dawkins' original argument. In particular, denying memes are a unit, or are explainable in some clear unitary structure denies the cultural analogy that inspired Dawkins to define them. If memes are not describable as unitary, memes are not accountable within a neo-Darwinian model of evolutionary culture.
Within cultural anthropology, materialist approaches are skeptical of such units. In particular, Dan Sperber argues that memes are not unitary in the sense that there are no two instances of exactly the same cultural idea, all that can be argued is that there is material mimicry of an idea. Thus every instance of a "meme" would not be a true evolutionary unit of replication.
Dan Deacon, Kalevi Kull separately argued memes are degenerate Signs in that they offer only a partial explanation of the triadic in Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic theory: a sign (a reference to an object), an object (the thing being referred to), and an interpretant (the interpreting actor of a sign). They argue the meme unit is a sign which only is defined by its replication ability. Accordingly, in the broadest sense, the objects of copying are memes, whereas the objects of translation and interpretation are signs. Later, Sara Cannizzaro more fully develops out this semiotic relation in order to reframe memes as being a kind of semiotic activity, however she too denies that memes are units, referring to them as "sign systems" instead.
In Limor Shifman's account of Internet memetics, she also denies memetics as being unitary. She argues memes are not unitary, however many assume they are because many previous memetic researchers confounded memes with the cultural interest in "virals": singular informational objects which spread with a particular rate and veracity such as a video or a picture. (2026). 9780745671284, Polity Press. ISBN 9780745671284 As such, Shifman argues that Dawkins' original notion of meme is closer to what communication and information studies consider digitally viral replication.
Unlike genetic evolution, memetic evolution can show both Darwinian and Lamarckian traits. Cultural memes will have the characteristic of Lamarckian inheritance when a host aspires to replicate the given meme through inference rather than by exactly copying it. Take for example the case of the transmission of a simple skill such as hammering a nail, a skill that a learner imitates from watching a demonstration without necessarily imitating every discrete movement modeled by the teacher in the demonstration, stroke for stroke. Susan Blackmore distinguishes the difference between the two modes of inheritance in the evolution of memes, characterizing the Darwinian mode as "copying the instructions" and the Lamarckian as "copying the product".
Clusters of memes, or (also known as meme complexes or as memecomplexes), such as cultural or political doctrines and systems, may also play a part in the acceptance of new memes. Memeplexes comprise groups of memes that replicate together and coadapt. Memes that fit within a successful memeplex may gain acceptance by "piggybacking" on the success of the memeplex. As an example, John D. Gottsch discusses the transmission, mutation and selection of religious memeplexes and the theistic memes contained. Theistic memes discussed include the "prohibition of aberrant sexual practices such as incest, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality, castration, and religious prostitution", which may have increased vertical transmission of the parent religious memeplex. Similar memes are thereby included in the majority of religious memeplexes, and harden over time; they become an "inviolable canon" or set of , eventually finding their way into secular law. This could also be referred to as the propagation of a taboo.
One frequent criticism of meme theory looks at the perceived gap in the gene/meme analogy. For example, Luis Benitez-Bribiesca points to the lack of a "code script" for memes (analogous to the DNA of genes), and to the excessive instability of the meme mutation mechanism (that of an idea going from one brain to another), which would lead to a low replication accuracy and a high mutation rate, rendering the evolutionary process chaotic. In his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel C. Dennett points to the existence of self-regulating correction mechanisms (vaguely resembling those of gene transcription) enabled by the redundancy and other properties of most meme expression languages which stabilize information transfer. Dennett notes that spiritual narratives, including music and dance forms, can survive in full detail across any number of generations even in cultures with oral tradition only. In contrast, when applying only meme theory, memes for which stable copying methods are available will inevitably get selected for survival more often than those which can only have unstable mutations (such as the noted music and dance forms), which, according to meme theory, should have resulted in those forms of cultural expression going extinct.
A second common criticism of meme theory views it as a reductionist and inadequate version of more accepted anthropological theories. Kim Sterelny and Paul Griffiths noted the cumulative evolution of genes depends on biological selection-pressures neither too great nor too small in relation to mutation-rates, while pointing out there is no reason to think that the same balance will exist in the selection pressures on memes.; p. 333 Semiotic theorists such as Terrence Deacon and Kalevi Kull regard the concept of a meme as a primitivized or degenerate concept of a sign, containing only a sign's basic ability to be copied, but lacks other core elements of the sign concept such as translation and interpretation. Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr similarly disapproved of Dawkins's gene-based view of meme, asserting it to be an "unnecessary synonym" for a concept, reasoning that concepts are not restricted to an individual or a generation, may persist for long periods of time, and may evolve.
A third approach, described by Joseph Poulshock, as "radical memetics" seeks to place memes at the centre of a materialistic theory of mind and of personal identity.
Prominent researchers in evolutionary psychology and anthropology, including Scott Atran, Dan Sperber, Pascal Boyer, John Tooby and others, argue the possibility of incompatibility between modularity of mind and memetics. In their view, minds structure certain communicable aspects of the ideas produced, and these communicable aspects generally trigger or elicit ideas in other minds through inference (to relatively rich structures generated from often low-fidelity input) and not high-fidelity replication or imitation. Atran discusses communication involving religious beliefs as a case in point. In one set of experiments he asked religious people to write down on a piece of paper the meanings of the Ten Commandments. Despite the subjects' own expectations of consensus, interpretations of the commandments showed wide ranges of variation, with little evidence of consensus. In another experiment, subjects with autism and subjects without autism interpreted ideological and religious sayings (for example, "Let a thousand flowers bloom" or "To everything there is a season"). People with autism showed a significant tendency to closely paraphrase and repeat content from the original statement (for example: "Don't cut flowers before they bloom"). Controls tended to infer a wider range of cultural meanings with little replicated content (for example: "Go with the flow" or "Everyone should have equal opportunity"). Only the subjects with autism—who lack the degree of inferential capacity normally associated with aspects of theory of mind—came close to functioning as "meme machines".
In his book The Robot's Rebellion, Keith Stanovich uses the memes and memeplex concepts to describe a program of cognitive reform that he refers to as a "rebellion". Specifically, Stanovich argues that the use of memes as a descriptor for cultural units is beneficial because it serves to emphasize transmission and acquisition properties that parallel the study of epidemiology. These properties make salient the sometimes parasitic nature of acquired memes, and as a result individuals should be motivated to reflectively acquire memes using what he calls a "Neurathian bootstrap" process.
He argued that the role of key replicator in cultural evolution belongs not to genes, but to memes replicating thought from person to person by means of imitation. These replicators respond to selective pressures that may or may not affect biological reproduction or survival.
In her book The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore regards religions as particularly tenacious memes. Many of the features common to the most widely practiced religions provide built-in advantages in an evolutionary context, she writes. For example, religions that preach of the value of faith over evidence from everyday experience or reason inoculate societies against many of the most basic tools people commonly use to evaluate their ideas. By linking altruism with religious affiliation, religious memes can proliferate more quickly because people perceive that they can reap societal as well as personal rewards. The longevity of religious memes improves with their documentation in revered religious texts.
Aaron Lynch attributed the robustness of religious memes in human culture to the fact that such memes incorporate multiple modes of meme transmission. Religious memes pass down the generations from parent to child and across a single generation through the meme-exchange of proselytism. Most people will hold the religion taught them by their parents throughout their life. Many religions feature adversarial elements, punishing apostasy, for instance, or demonizing infidels. In Thought Contagion Lynch identifies the memes of transmission in Christianity as especially powerful in scope. Believers view the conversion of non-believers both as a religious duty and as an act of altruism. The promise of heaven to believers and threat of hell to non-believers provide a strong incentive for members to retain their belief. Lynch asserts that belief in the Crucifixion of Jesus in Christianity amplifies each of its other replication advantages through the indebtedness believers have to their Savior for sacrifice on the cross. The image of the crucifixion recurs in religious , and the proliferation of symbols of the Christian cross in homes and churches potently reinforces the wide array of Christian memes.
Although religious memes have proliferated in human cultures, the modern scientific community has been relatively resistant to religious belief. Robertson (2007) reasoned that if evolution is accelerated in conditions of propagative difficulty, then we would expect to encounter variations of religious memes, established in general populations, addressed to scientific communities. Using a memetic approach, Robertson deconstructed two attempts to privilege religiously held spirituality in scientific discourse. Advantages of a memetic approach as compared to more traditional "modernization" and "supply side" theses in understanding the evolution and propagation of religion were explored.
Architectural memes, according to Salingaros, can have destructive power: "Images portrayed in architectural magazines representing buildings that could not possibly accommodate everyday uses become fixed in our memory, so we reproduce them unconsciously." He lists various architectural memes that circulated since the 1920s and which, in his view, have led to contemporary architecture becoming quite decoupled from human needs. They lack connection and meaning, thereby preventing "the creation of true connections necessary to our understanding of the world". He sees them as no different from in software design—as solutions that are false but are re-utilized nonetheless.
In 2013, Dawkins characterized an Internet meme as one deliberately altered by human creativity, distinguished from his original idea involving mutation "by random change and a form of Darwinian selection".
Internet memes are an example of Dawkins' meme theory at work in the sense of how they so rapidly mirror current cultural events and become a part of how the time period is defined. Limor Shifman uses the example of the 'Gangnam Style' Music video by South Korean pop-star, Psy that went viral in 2012. Shifman cites examples of how the meme mutated itself into the cultural sphere, mixing with other things going on at the time such as the 2012 U.S. presidential election, which led to the creation of Mitt Romney Style, a parody of the original Gangnam style, intended to be a jab at the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney.
In Chagas et. al article about political memes, they look at how online memes have become an important part of politics, specifically in Brazil during the 2014 presidential election. The authors argue that memes are more than just silly jokes, they can also reflect the publics opinions and demonstrate how people feel about certain movements or candidates. The research is focused on how memes are spread through humor and culture, making some political content easier to understand. Memes can also help people to connect with others they share political ideals with. At times, politicians can even respond to or use memes in their campaign strategies. Some politicians will embrace the jokes, while others do not respond as well to the criticism. Overall, the article argues that memes are important in terms of modern political communication and go beyond just our entertainment.
|
|
