From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Memetics is a theory of the evolution of culture based on Darwinian principles with the meme as the unit of culture. The term "meme" was coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, to illustrate the principle that he later called "Universal Darwinism". All evolutionary processes depend on information being copied, varied, and selected, a process also known as variation with selective retention. The information that is copied is called the replicator, and genes are the replicator for biological evolution. Dawkins proposed that the same process drives cultural evolution, and he called this second replicator the "meme". He gave as examples, tunes, catchphrases, fashions, and technologies.
Like genes, memes are selfish replicators and have causal efficacy; in
other words, their properties influence their chances of being copied
and passed on. Some succeed because they are valuable or useful to their
human hosts while others are more like viruses.
Just as genes can work together to form co-adapted gene complexes, so groups of memes acting together form co-adapted meme complexes or memeplexes. Memeplexes include (among many other things) languages, traditions, scientific theories, financial institutions, and religions. Dawkins famously referred to religions as "viruses of the mind".
Among proponents of memetics are psychologist Susan Blackmore, author of The Meme Machine,
who argues that when our ancestors began imitating behaviours, they let
loose a second replicator and co-evolved to become the "meme machines"
that copy, vary, and select memes in culture. Philosopher Daniel Dennett develops memetics extensively, notably in his books Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and From Bacteria to Bach and Back. He describes the units of memes as "the smallest elements that replicate themselves with reliability and fecundity." and claims that "Human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes." In The Beginning of Infinity, physicist David Deutsch
contrasts static societies that depend on anti-rational memes
suppressing innovation and creativity, with dynamic societies based on
rational memes that encourage enlightenment values, scientific curiosity, and progress.
Criticisms of memetics include claims that memes do not exist,
that the analogy with genes is false, that the units cannot be
specified, that culture does not evolve through imitation, and that the
sources of variation are intelligently designed rather than random.
Critics of memetics include biologist Stephen Jay Gould who calls memetics a "meaningless metaphor". Philosopher Dan Sperber
argues against memetics as a viable approach to cultural evolution
because cultural items are not directly copied or imitated but are
reproduced. Anthropologist Robert Boyd and biologist Peter Richerson work within the alternative, and more mainstream, field of cultural evolution theory and gene-culture coevolution. Dual inheritance theory
has much in common with memetics but rejects the idea that memes are
replicators. From this perspective, memetics is seen as just one of
several approaches to cultural evolution and one that is generally
considered less useful than the alternatives of gene-culture coevolution
or dual inheritance theory. The main difference is that dual
inheritance theory ultimately depends on biological advantage to genes,
whereas memetics treats memes as a second replicator in its own right.
Memetics also extends to the analysis of Internet culture and Internet memes.
History
In his book The Selfish Gene (1976), the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins used the term meme to describe a unit of human cultural transmission analogous to the gene, arguing that replication also happens in culture, albeit in a different sense. While cultural evolution itself is a much older topic, with a history that dates back at least as far as Darwin's era, Dawkins (1976) proposed that the meme is a unit of culture residing in the brain and is the mutating replicator
in human cultural evolution. After Dawkins, many discussed this unit of
culture as evolutionary "information" which replicates with rules
analogous to Darwinian selection. A replicator is a pattern that can influence its surroundings – that is, it has causal agency
– and can propagate. This proposal resulted in debate among
anthropologists, sociologists, biologists, and scientists of other
disciplines. Dawkins did not provide a comprehensive explanation of how
replication of units of information in the brain controls human
behaviour and culture, as the main focus of the book was on gene
expression. Dawkins apparently did not intend to present a comprehensive
theory of memetics in The Selfish Gene, but rather coined the term meme in a speculative spirit. Accordingly, different researchers came to define the term "unit of information" in different ways.
The evolutionary model of cultural information transfer is based
on the concept that memes—units of information—have an independent
existence, are self-replicating, and are subject to selective evolution
through environmental forces.
Starting from a proposition put forward in the writings of Dawkins,
this model has formed the basis of a new area of study, one that looks
at the self-replicating units of culture. It has been proposed that just
as memes are analogous to genes, memetics is analogous to genetics.
The modern memetics movement dates from the mid-1980s. A January 1983 "Metamagical Themas" column by Douglas Hofstadter, in Scientific American, was influential – as was his 1985 book of the same name. "Memeticist" was coined as analogous to "geneticist" – originally in The Selfish Gene.
Later Arel Lucas suggested that the discipline that studies memes and
their connections to human and other carriers of them be known as
"memetics" by analogy with "genetics". Dawkins' The Selfish Gene
has been a factor in attracting the attention of people of disparate
intellectual backgrounds. Another stimulus was the publication in 1991
of Consciousness Explained by Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett, which incorporated the meme concept into a theory of the mind. In his 1991 essay "Viruses of the Mind",
Richard Dawkins used memetics to explain the phenomenon of religious
belief and the various characteristics of organised religions. By then,
memetics had also become a theme appearing in fiction (e.g. Neal
Stephenson's Snow Crash).
The idea of language as a virus had already been introduced by William S. Burroughs as early as 1962 in his fictional book The Ticket That Exploded, and continued in The Electronic Revolution, published in 1970 in The Job.
The foundation of memetics in its full modern incarnation was launched by Douglas Rushkoff's Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture in 1995, and was accelerated with the publication in 1996 of two more books by authors outside the academic mainstream: Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme by former Microsoft executive turned motivational speaker and professional poker-player Richard Brodie, and Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society by Aaron Lynch, a mathematician and philosopher who worked for many years as an engineer at Fermilab.
Lynch claimed to have conceived his theory totally independently of any
contact with academics in the cultural evolutionary sphere, and
apparently was not aware of The Selfish Gene until his book was very close to publication.
Around the same time as the publication of the books by Lynch and Brodie the e-journal Journal of Memetics – Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission (published electronically from 1997 to 2005) first appeared. It was first hosted by the Centre for Policy Modelling at Manchester Metropolitan University.
The e-journal soon became the central point for publication and debate
within the nascent memeticist community. (There had been a short-lived
paper-based memetics publication starting in 1990, the Journal of Ideas edited by Elan Moritz.) In 1999, Susan Blackmore, a psychologist at the University of the West of England, published The Meme Machine,
which more fully worked out the ideas of Dennett, Lynch, and Brodie and
attempted to compare and contrast them with various approaches from the
cultural evolutionary mainstream, as well as providing novel (and
controversial) memetics-based theories for the evolution of language and
the human sense of individual selfhood.
Etymology
The term meme derives from the Ancient Greek μιμητής (mimētḗs), meaning "imitator, pretender". The similar term mneme was used in 1904, by the German evolutionary biologist Richard Semon, best known for his development of the engram theory of memory, in his work Die mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen, translated into English in 1921 as The Mneme. Until Daniel Schacter published Forgotten Ideas, Neglected Pioneers: Richard Semon and the Story of Memory in 2000, Semon's work had little influence, though it was quoted extensively in Erwin Schrödinger’s 1956 Tarner Lecture “Mind and Matter”. Richard Dawkins (1976) apparently coined the word meme independently of Semon, writing this:
"'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."
David Hull
(2001) pointed out Dawkins's oversight of Semon's work. Hull suggests
this early work as an alternative origin to memetics by which Dawkins's
memetic theory and classicist connection to the concept can be
negotiated.
"Why not date the beginnings of memetics
(or mnemetics) as 1904 or at the very least 1914? If [Semon's] two
publications are taken as the beginnings of memetics, then the
development of memetics [...] has been around for almost a hundred years
without much in the way of conceptual or empirical advance!"
Despite
this, Semon's work remains mostly understood as distinct to memetic
origins even with the overt similarities accounted for by Hull.
Internalists and externalists
The
memetics movement split almost immediately into two. The first group
were those who wanted to stick to Dawkins' definition of a meme as "a
unit of cultural transmission". Gibron Burchett, a memeticist responsible for helping to research and co-coin the term memetic engineering, along with Leveious Rolando and Larry Lottman, has stated that a meme can be defined, more precisely, as "a unit of cultural information
that can be copied, located in the brain". This thinking is more in
line with Dawkins' second definition of the meme in his book The Extended Phenotype. The second group wants to redefine memes as observable cultural artifacts
and behaviors. However, in contrast to those two positions, the article
"Consciousness in meme machines" by Susan Blackmore rejects neither
movement.
These two schools became known as the "internalists" and the
"externalists." Prominent internalists included both Lynch and Brodie;
the most vocal externalists included Derek Gatherer, a geneticist from Liverpool John Moores University,
and William Benzon, a writer on cultural evolution and music. The main
rationale for externalism was that internal brain entities are not
observable, and memetics cannot advance as a science, especially a quantitative
science, unless it moves its emphasis onto the directly quantifiable
aspects of culture. Internalists countered with various arguments: that
brain states will eventually be directly observable with advanced
technology, that most cultural anthropologists agree that culture is
about beliefs
and not artifacts, or that artifacts cannot be replicators in the same
sense as mental entities (or DNA) are replicators. The debate became so
heated that a 1998 Symposium on Memetics, organised as part of the 15th
International Conference on Cybernetics,
passed a motion calling for an end to definitional debates. McNamara
demonstrated in 2011 that functional connectivity profiling using
neuroimaging tools enables the observation of the processing of internal
memes, "i-memes", in response to external "e-memes".
This was developed further in a paper "Memetics and Neural Models of
Conspiracy Theories" by Duch, where a model of memes as a quasi-stable
neural associative memory attractor network is proposed, and a formation of Memeplex leading to conspiracy theories illustrated with the simulation of a self-organizing network.
An advanced statement of the internalist school came in 2002 with the publication of The Electric Meme, by Robert Aunger, an anthropologist from the University of Cambridge.
Aunger also organised a conference in Cambridge in 1999, at which
prominent sociologists and anthropologists were able to give their
assessment of the progress made in memetics to that date. This resulted
in the publication of Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science, edited by Aunger and with a foreword by Dennett, in 2001.
Decline
In 2005, the Journal of Memetics
ceased publication and published a set of articles on the future of
memetics. The website states that although "there was to be a
relaunch... after several years nothing has happened". Susan Blackmore
left the University of the West of England to become a freelance
science-writer and now concentrates more on the field of consciousness
and cognitive science. Derek Gatherer moved to work as a computer
programmer in the pharmaceutical industry, although he still
occasionally publishes on memetics-related matters. Richard Brodie is now climbing the world professional poker rankings. Aaron Lynch
disowned the memetics community and the words "meme" and "memetics"
(without disowning the ideas in his book), adopting the self-description
"thought contagionist". He died in 2005.
Susan Blackmore
(2002) re-stated the definition of meme as: whatever is copied from one
person to another person, whether habits, skills, songs, stories, or
any other kind of information. Further she said that memes, like genes,
are replicators in the sense as defined by Dawkins.
That is, they are information that is copied. Memes are copied by imitation,
teaching and other methods. The copies are not perfect: memes are
copied with variation; moreover, they compete for space in our memories
and for the chance to be copied again. Only some of the variants can
survive. The combination of these three elements (copies; variation;
competition for survival) forms precisely the condition for Darwinian evolution, and so memes (and hence human cultures) evolve. Large groups of memes that are copied and passed on together are called co-adapted meme complexes, or memeplexes. In Blackmore's definition, the way that a meme replicates is through imitation. This requires brain
capacity to generally imitate a model or selectively imitate the model.
Since the process of social learning varies from one person to another,
the imitation process cannot be said to be completely imitated. The
sameness of an idea may be expressed with different memes supporting it.
This is to say that the mutation
rate in memetic evolution is extremely high, and mutations are even
possible within each and every iteration of the imitation process. It
becomes very interesting when we see that a social system composed of a
complex network of microinteractions exists, but at the macro level an
order emerges to create culture.
Many researchers of cultural evolution regard memetic theory of this time a failed paradigm superseded by dual inheritance theory.
Others instead suggest it is not superseded but rather holds a small
but distinct intellectual space in cultural evolutionary theory.
"Internet Memetics"
A new framework of Internet Memetics initially borrowed
Blackmore's conceptual developments but is effectively a data-driven
approach, focusing on digital artifacts. This was led primarily by
conceptual developments Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel (2006) and Limor Shifman and Mike Thelwall (2009).
Shiman, in particular, followed Susan Blackmore in rejecting the
internalist and externalist debate, however did not offer a clear
connection to prior evolutionary frameworks. Later in 2014, she rejected
the historical relevance of "information" to memetics. Instead of memes
being units of cultural information, she argued information is
exclusively delegated to be "the ways in which addressers position
themselves in relation to [a meme instance's] text, its linguistic
codes, the addressees, and other potential speakers." This is what she called stance, which is analytically distinguished from the content and form
of her meme. As such, Shifman's developments can be seen as critical to
Dawkins's meme, but also as a somewhat distinct conceptualization of
the meme as a communicative system dependent on the internet and social
media platforms. By introducing memetics as an internet study there has
been a rise in empirical research. That is, memetics in this
conceptualization has been notably testable by the application of social
science methodologies. It has been popular enough that following
Lankshear and Knobel's (2019) review of empirical trends, they warn
those interested in memetics that theoretical development should not be
ignored, concluding that,
"[R]ight now would be a
good time for anyone seriously interested in memes to revisit Dawkins’
work in light of how internet memes have evolved over the past three
decades and reflect on what most merits careful and conscientious
research attention."
As
Lankshear and Knobel show, the Internet Memetic reconceptualization is
limited in addressing long-standing memetic theory concerns. It is not
clear that existing Internet Memetic theory's departure from conceptual
dichotomies between internalist and externalist debate are compatible
with most earlier concerns of memetics. Internet Memetics might be
understood as a study without an agreed upon theory, as present research
tends to focus on empirical developments answering theories of other
areas of cultural research. It exists more as a set of distributed
studies than a methodology, theory, field, or discipline, with a few
exceptions such as Shifman and those closely following her motivating
framework.
Criticisms
Critics contend that some of the proponents' assertions are "untested, unsupported or incorrect." Most of the history of memetic criticism has been directed at Dawkins' earlier theory of memetics framed in The Selfish Gene.
There have been some serious criticisms of memetics. Namely, there are a
few key points on which most criticisms focus: mentalism, cultural
determinism, Darwinian reduction, a lack of academic novelty, and a lack
of empirical evidence of memetic mechanisms.
Luis Benitez-Bribiesca points to the lack of memetic mechanisms. He refers to the lack of a code script
for memes which would suggest a genuine analogy to DNA in genes. He
also suggests the meme mutation mechanism is too unstable which would
render the evolutionary process chaotic. That is to say that the "unit
of information" which traverses across minds is perhaps too flexible in
meaning to be a realistic unit. As such, he calls memetics "a pseudoscientific dogma" and "a dangerous idea that poses a threat to the serious study of consciousness and cultural evolution" among other things.
Another criticism points to memetic triviality. That is, some
have argued memetics is derivative of more rich areas of study. One of
these cases comes from Peircian semiotics, (e.g., Deacon, Kull) stating that the concept of meme is a less developed Sign.
Meme is thus described in memetics as a sign without its triadic
nature. Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic theory involves a triadic
structure: a sign (a reference to an object), an object (the thing being
referred to), and an interpretant (the interpreting actor of a sign).
For Deacon and Kull, the meme is a degenerate sign, which includes only
its ability of being copied. Accordingly, in the broadest sense, the
objects of copying are memes, whereas the objects of translation and
interpretation are signs.
Others have pointed to the fact that memetics reduces genuine
social and communicative activity to genetic arguments, and this cannot
adequately describe cultural interactions between people. For example, Henry Jenkins, Joshua Green, and Sam Ford, in their book Spreadable Media
(2013), criticize Dawkins' idea of the meme, writing that "while the
idea of the meme is a compelling one, it may not adequately account for
how content circulates through participatory culture." The three authors
also criticize other interpretations of memetics, especially those
which describe memes as "self-replicating", because they ignore the fact
that "culture is a human product and replicates through human agency." In doing so, they align more closely with Shifman's notion of Internet Memetics and her addition of the human agency of stance to describe participatory structure.
Mary Midgley criticizes memetics for at least two reasons:
"One, culture is not best understood by
examining its smallest parts, as culture is pattern-like, comparable to
an ocean current. Many more factors, historical and others, should be
taken into account than only whatever particle culture is built from.
Two, if memes are not thoughts (and thus not cognitive phenomena), as
Daniel C. Dennett insists in "
Darwin's Dangerous Idea", then their
ontological status is open to question, and memeticists (who are also
reductionists)
may be challenged whether memes even exist. Questions can extend to
whether the idea of "meme" is itself a meme or is a true concept.
Fundamentally, memetics is an attempt to produce knowledge through
organic metaphors, which as such is a questionable research approach, as
the application of metaphors has the effect of hiding that which does
not fit within the realm of the metaphor. Rather than study actual
reality, without preconceptions, memetics, as so many of the
socio-biological explanations of society, believe that saying that the
apple is like an orange is a valid analysis of the apple."
Like other critics, Maria Kronfeldner has criticized memetics for
being based on an allegedly inaccurate analogy with the gene;
alternately, she claims it is "heuristically trivial", being a mere
redescription of what is already known without offering any useful
novelty.
New developments
Alternative definitions
- Dawkins, in A Devil's Chaplain,
expanded his definition of meme by saying there are actually two
different types of memetic processes (controversial and informative).
The first is a type of cultural idea, action, or expression, which does
have high variance; for instance, a student of his who had inherited
some of the mannerisms of Wittgenstein. The second type is a self-correcting meme that is highly resistant to mutation. As an example of this, he gives origami
patterns taught to elementary students– the meme is either passed on in
the exact sequence of instructions, or (in the case of a forgetful
child) terminates. The self-correcting meme tends to not evolve, and to
experience profound mutations in the rare event that it does.
- Another definition, given by Hokky Situngkir, tried to offer a more rigorous formalism for the meme, memeplexes, and the deme, seeing the meme as a cultural unit in a cultural complex system. It is based on the Darwinian genetic algorithm
with some modifications to account for the different patterns of
evolution seen in genes and memes. In the method of memetics as the way
to see culture as a complex adaptive system, he describes a way to see memetics as an alternative methodology of cultural evolution.
- DiCarlo (2010) developed the definition of meme further to include
the idea of 'memetic equilibrium', which describe a culturally
compatible state with biological equilibrium.
In "How Problem Solving and Neurotransmission in the Upper Paleolithic
led to The Emergence and Maintenance of Memetic Equilibrium in
Contemporary World Religions", DiCarlo argues that as human
consciousness evolved and developed, so too did our ancestors' capacity
to consider and attempt to solve environmental problems in more
conceptually sophisticated ways. When a satisfactory solution is found,
the feeling of environmental stability, or memetic equilibrium, is
achieved. The relationship between a gradually emerging conscious
awareness and sophisticated languages in which to formulate
representations combined with the desire to maintain biological
equilibrium, generated the necessity for equilibrium to fill in
conceptual gaps in terms of understanding three very important aspects
in the Upper Paleolithic: causality, morality, and mortality. The desire
to explain phenomena in relation to maintaining survival and
reproductive stasis, generated a normative stance in the minds of our
ancestors—Survival/Reproductive Value (or S-R Value).
- Limor Shifman (2014) defines Internet memes, memes in
digitally mediated contexts, to be (a) a group of digital items sharing
common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance, which (b) were
created with awareness of each other, and (c) were circulated, imitated,
and/or transformed via the Internet by many users. Further, she outlines content as "both ideas and ideologies", form as "the physical incarnation of the message", and stance as "the information memes convey about their own communication."
Stance is about how actors (e.g. people) position themselves in
relation to content and form of the media as well as those who might be
addressed by the message.
- Over a decade after Kull's and Deacon's semiotic critique, Sara
Cannizzaro offered her own development to redeem memes as fully formed cybersemiotic signs which has had limited success among those adjacent to Internet Memetics.
In particular, she translates many of the neo-Darwinian
conceptualizations of evolution to biosemiotic evolutionary concepts.
This approach was theoretically integrated with an empirical
investigation of information in Alexander O. Smith and Jeff Hemsley's
development. They suggested under the influence of Cannizzaro's work
that memes are "an information transmission network of documents
connected through their differences among similarities and is
interpreted as a semiotic system".
Memetic analysis
- The possibility of quantitative analysis of memes using neuroimaging tools and the suggestion that such studies have already been done was given by McNamara (2011). This author proposes hyperscanning
(concurrent scanning of two communicating individuals in two separate
MRI machines) as a key tool in the future for investigating memetics.
- Proponents of memetics as described in the Journal of Memetics (out of print since 2005)
believe that 'memetics' has the potential to be an important and
promising analysis of culture using the framework of evolutionary
concepts.
- Keith Henson in Memetics and the Modular-Mind (Analog Aug. 1987) makes the case that memetics needs to incorporate evolutionary psychology to understand the psychological traits of a meme's host.
- The primary analytic approaches of internet memetics has been more
in association with visual culture and communication methodologies.
These researchers justify the existence of memes by way of culturally
association, social networks or networked artifacts, most notably online image artifacts.
Applications
Research methodologies that apply memetics go by many names: Viral marketing,
cultural evolution, the history of ideas, social analytics, and more.
Many of these applications do not make reference to the literature on
memes directly but are built upon the evolutionary lens of idea
propagation that treats semantic units of culture as self-replicating
and mutating patterns of information that are assumed to be relevant for
scientific study. For example, the field of public relations is filled
with attempts to introduce new ideas and alter social discourse. One
means of doing this is to design a meme and deploy it through various
media channels. One historic example of applied memetics is the PR
campaign conducted in 1991 as part of the build-up to the first Gulf War
in the United States.
The application of memetics to a difficult complex social system problem, environmental sustainability, has recently been attempted at thwink.org
Using meme types and memetic infection in several stock and flow
simulation models, Jack Harich has demonstrated several interesting
phenomena that are best, and perhaps only, explained by memes. One
model, The Dueling Loops of the Political Powerplace,
argues that the fundamental reason corruption is the norm in politics
is due to an inherent structural advantage of one feedback loop pitted
against another. Another model, The Memetic Evolution of Solutions to
Difficult Problems, uses memes, the evolutionary algorithm, and the scientific method
to show how complex solutions evolve over time and how that process can
be improved. The insights gained from these models are being used to
engineer memetic solution elements to the sustainability problem.
Another application of memetics in the sustainability space is the crowdfunded Climate Meme Project
conducted by Joe Brewer and Balazs Laszlo Karafiath in the spring of
2013. This study was based on a collection of 1000 unique text-based
expressions gathered from Twitter, Facebook, and structured interviews
with climate activists. The major finding was that the global warming
meme is not effective at spreading because it causes emotional duress in
the minds of people who learn about it. Five central tensions were
revealed in the discourse about [climate change], each of which
represents a resonance point through which dialogue can be engaged. The
tensions were Harmony/Disharmony (whether or not humans are part of the
natural world), Survival/Extinction (envisioning the future as either
apocalyptic collapse of civilization or total extinction of the human
race), Cooperation/Conflict (regarding whether or not humanity can come
together to solve global problems), Momentum/Hesitation (about whether
or not we are making progress at the collective scale to address climate change),
and Elitism/Heretic (a general sentiment that each side of the debate
considers the experts of its opposition to be untrustworthy).
Ben Cullen, in his book Contagious Ideas,
brought the idea of the meme into the discipline of archaeology. He
coined the term "Cultural Virus Theory", and used it to try to anchor
archaeological theory in a neo-Darwinian paradigm. Archaeological
memetics could assist the application of the meme concept to material
culture in particular.
Francis Heylighen of the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies has postulated what he calls "memetic selection criteria". These criteria opened the way to a specialized field of applied memetics to find out if these selection criteria could stand the test of quantitative analyses. In 2003 Klaas Chielens carried out these tests in a Masters thesis project on the testability of the selection criteria.
In Selfish Sounds and Linguistic Evolution,
Austrian linguist Nikolaus Ritt has attempted to operationalise memetic
concepts and use them for the explanation of long term sound changes
and change conspiracies in early English. It is argued that a
generalised Darwinian framework for handling cultural change can provide
explanations where established, speaker centred approaches fail to do
so. The book makes comparatively concrete suggestions about the possible
material structure of memes, and provides two empirically rich case
studies.
Australian academic S.J. Whitty has argued that project management is a memeplex with the language and stories of its practitioners at its core.
This radical approach sees a project and its management as an illusion;
a human construct about a collection of feelings, expectations, and
sensations, which are created, fashioned, and labeled by the human
brain. Whitty's approach requires project managers to consider that the
reasons for using project management are not consciously driven to
maximize profit, and are encouraged to consider project management as
naturally occurring, self-serving, evolving process which shapes
organizations for its own purpose.
Swedish political scientist Mikael Sandberg argues against "Lamarckian" interpretations of institutional and technological evolution and studies creative innovation of information technologies in governmental and private organizations in Sweden in the 1990s from a memetic perspective.
Comparing the effects of active ("Lamarckian") IT strategy versus
user–producer interactivity (Darwinian co-evolution), evidence from
Swedish organizations shows that co-evolutionary interactivity is almost
four times as strong a factor behind IT creativity as the "Lamarckian"
IT strategy.
Terminology
- Memeplex – (an abbreviation of meme-complex) is a collection or grouping of memes that have evolved into a mutually supportive or symbiotic relationship.
Simply put, a meme-complex is a set of ideas that reinforce each other.
Meme-complexes are roughly analogous to the symbiotic collection of
individual genes that make up the genetic codes of biological organisms. An example of a memeplex would be a religion.
- Meme pool – a population of interbreeding memes.
- Memetic engineering – The process of deliberately creating memes, using engineering principles.
- Memetic algorithms – an approach to evolutionary computation that attempts to emulate cultural evolution in order to solve optimization problems.
- Memetic computing
- Memotype – the actual information-content of a meme.
- Memeoid – a neologism for people who have been taken over by a meme to the extent that their own survival becomes inconsequential. Examples include kamikazes, suicide bombers and cult members who commit mass suicide. The term was apparently coined by H. Keith Henson in "Memes, L5 and the Religion of the Space Colonies," L5 News, September 1985 pp. 5–8, and referenced in the expanded second edition of Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene (p. 330). In The Electronic Revolution William S. Burroughs writes: "the word has not been recognised as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host."
- Memetic equilibrium – the cultural equivalent of species biological
equilibrium. It is that which humans strive for in terms of personal
value with respect to cultural artefacts and ideas. The term was coined
by Christopher diCarlo.
- Metamemetic thinking - coined by Diego Fontanive, is the thinking
skill & cognitive training capable of making individuals acknowledge
illogical memes.
- Eumemics - the belief and practice of deliberately improving the quality of the meme pool.
- Memocide - intentional action to eradicate a meme or memeplex from
the population, either by killing its carriers or by censorship.
