Memes
Robert Drake
Date: August 16th, 2008
Category: Science
Views: 24
Memes are interesting. I haven’t yet decided whether or not they are a brilliant and insightful look into human culture, or a fake science with no real potential to enlighten.
The link that sets me a-thinking, is this list of so called ‘memes’. A meme is phrase or a video or a piece of culture that gets spread throughout a society. According to memetics, memes are spread in a process somewhat akin to Evolution. New memes are created either via something or through a mutation of something old (a popular movie misquote for example). They propagate through society with some members rejecting to spread the memes and others spreading the meme to large sections of the populace. One can imagine certain individuals being Meme-fertile and others Meme-sterile.
Part of my considers the list of memes linked above to be more of a categorization of internet jokes. In a specific sense that is actually rather true, however the speed at which these jokes spread throughout the internet and their continued ‘virility’ in internet discourse is certainly worthy of some consideration.
However, is there any difference between a meme and a society’s literary culture? Prior to the internet and even more so prior to the movies, books and plays formed society’s culture. Popular lines from poems were as memetic as any modern youtube video, however their means of propagation was too limited to have any outside relevance.
Much like my article from yesterday, the ‘six degrees of separation’, memes seem to suggest human society is, and likely has always been, much more interconnected that political and racial history would normally allow. Much like the interconnected genealogies of the various European royal families, all individuals seem to have closer relationships that could possibly be imagined in a world of 6 billion.
In the future, communication technologies are going to change. The internet is a textual medium predominately. Videos will become the standard method of distribution soon enough one suspects. Who knows what will exist beyond that. The question is, will these communication technologies increase or decrease the speed, and more importantly, the extent of memetic propagation. Will human society become more or less interconnected? Is more ‘interconnectedness’ better or worse?
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