作者: Ph.D., John Gunders / Damon Brown
出版社: Alpha
出版年: 2010-10-5
页数: 336
定价: USD 18.95
ISBN: 9781615640355
A meme is a cultural expression that is passed on from one person or group to another person or group.
A meme-complex or memeplex is a concept that contains a collection of memes.
- A meme is a cultural unit of measure; essentially, an idea that can be passed on to another person.
- Memes can be physical, technological, or personal.
- The most prominent ways to pass memes are through word of mouth, the Internet, and marketing.
- To be a meme, an idea must be original, digestible, and easy to understand.
- The Internet transformed memes and sped up how quickly ideas were passed.
The term “meme” was coined by zoologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.
Universal Darwinism is the principle that natural selection does not necessarily have to apply only to organic evolution but can also describe equally well things as diverse as economics, linguistics, and computer algorithms.
Natural selection requires three things: variation, selection, and retention. Variation means that there will be slight differences between individuals within the same group of entities. Selection means that when these entities are subject to environmental pressure—diminishing resources, perhaps—only some will survive, and those that do will be the ones better suited to the conditions. Retention means that characteristics of a particular entity will be passed on to others.
A meme might be an (often simple) cultural idea, but it requires several components to exist:
- The memetic engineer
- First, the actual meme creation doesn’t have to be a conscious act.
- Second, the memetic engineer doesn’t even have to be human.
- The hook
- A common term in advertising, the hook is the connector that attracts us to memes.
- The bait
- In the axiom, “Helping other people creates good karma,” the bait is that being of benefit to your fellow humans will help you have a positive life.
- The vector
- A vector is the impartial medium used to transport the meme to others. Think of the vector as a carrier, or a messenger—such as a book or television show—delivering the cultural idea to the masses.
- The host
- If the vector is the medium used to pass along the meme, the host is the carrier that sent the meme in the first place. Think of the vector as mail and the host as the mail deliverer.
- The memotype
- The memotype is the actual expression of a meme. A well-worn fashion meme is, “Don’t wear white after Labor Day,” referencing the American holiday that marks the beginning of autumn.
- The sociotype
- The sociotype is the meme’s expression within the social and cultural environment in which that memotype exists.
- A meme requires seven elements: a memetic engineer, hook, bait, vector, host, memotype, and sociotype.
- The hook and bait are the attracting factor and the perceived reward of the meme.
- The memetic engineer creates the meme while the host initiates the delivery.
- The memotype is the actual expression of a meme while the sociotype is how a particular group applies the meme.
- The Internet has become a major vector, or deliverer, of memes.
Gossip is a meme that isn’t necessarily malicious but does imply personal gain. It is traditionally passed via word of mouth.
How do we separate gossip from other word-of-mouth ideas? It has a few unique attributes:
- It is passed on for personal gain.
- It is often misinformation masked as helpful information.
- It is a slightly skewed version of the truth.
A tipping point is the moment when a trend becomes popular among the mainstream. It is essentially when a meme becomes both public and viral.
Three types of individuals who serve as gatekeepers to tipping points:
- Connectors
- Mavens
- Salesmen
A tipping point only occurs if the audience itself is ready for the idea.
In a simple example, think about the popular website YouTube. There were video upload websites before it, such as eBaum’s World, but YouTube happened to come at a time when camcorders dropped in price and social networks like MySpace became places to share videos. When it comes to memes, timing is everything.
The power of the meme is important, but the cultural currency—that is, the respect—the potential meme receiver has for the deliverer is just as crucial when it comes to word of mouth.
- A gossip meme isn’t necessarily malicious, but it does imply personal gain.
- By nature, a meme passed along via word of mouth changes with each carrier.
- A tipping point is when a meme becomes public and viral on a grand scale.
- Tipping points do not happen until the mainstream public is ready for the idea.
- The word-of-mouth success of a meme depends on the cultural currency of, or respect one has for, the deliverer.
Two extremely significant changes occurred with the introduction of the Internet:
- Pictures could be easily spread.
- Pictures could function as blank memetic slates.
YouTube changed the viral video concept in a couple of key ways:
- Virtually instant passing of ideas
- YouTube enabled the nearly instantaneous passing of ideas. Have a new philosophical concept? Record a video of yourself discussing the idea and upload it to YouTube, and nearly the entire world can hear your perspective.
- Mass public discussion
- YouTube videos are rated on a five-star system, but viewer comments are connected below the video itself. Any ideas conveyed in the video are discussed, debated, and in many cases, transformed—as would be any meme passed along to another person.
Groupthink occurs when a crowd makes decisions that the individuals within the group would not commit to on their own. The group usually puts swift action over rational discussion and judgment.
- Video memes existed before YouTube, but the website helped them proliferate.
- Videos will not be copied or referenced unless they have reached a mainstream tipping point.
- Viruses are real, but hoaxes tend to occur around major global events.
- There are millions of computer viruses. The main commonality is that they self-replicate.
- Societal pressure to donate is magnified through our online social networks.
Viral marketing is creating an advertisement or message so powerful that the recipient will tell everyone in his or her social circle about the product.
Like any agile meme, modern advertising taps into our basest instincts:
- Fear
- Ecstasy
- Loneliness
- Jealousy
Conspicuous consumption means buying goods, services, and other related things to prove an equal or superior social status to peers. When two connected individuals or groups accept this meme, the never-ending battle can drive them to spend more than they can actually afford. It will only end when one stops believing in the meme.
Astroturfing is the act of making a professionally produced marketing campaign look like a naturally evolving grassroots movement. The assumption is that people will be more receptive to the message if it seemed to have happened organically.
- Viral marketing existed before the Internet, but the Internet enabled the memes to move faster and spread far wider.
- Most advertising before the ’50s used a straightforward, nonmanipulative approach.
- Modern advertising exploits a consumer’s fear, ecstasy, loneliness, and jealousy to sell products and services.
- Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking tools are used by marketers for advertising.
- Astroturfing is disguising a marketing ploy as a grassroots effort.
Fashion-forward describes something or someone that has a good instinct for the next couture trend and is secure enough to dress like it.
An earworm is a song or a portion of a song that gets “stuck” in your head.
Sampling is taking a portion of a song and modifying it in some way to create a new song. The process began in hip-hop music and was later picked up by pop, rock, and country artists.
- Fashion reflects the memes of the world.
- An earworm is the part of the song that makes it hard to forget.
- Music memes tend to return in the form of sampling or retro-popularity.
- Professional comedians want to share their memes while making sure they aren’t stolen by other performers.
- Humor is a learned meme.
- The invention of the wheel and the arch changed architecture—and as a result, human social evolution.
- Languages have to be active and evolve or they will die.
- Immigration helped different civilizations collaborate and share technological development.
- The Industrial Revolution pushed machines into all areas of our lives.
- The Internet democratized the memes available as well as the people who could access them.
Pay it forward is the act of repaying a good deed done for you by doing a good deed for another person. One particular philosophy, popularized in the movie adaptation of the book Pay it Forward, is that one good deed should be repaid with three good ones.
- Philosophy relates to the principles we use to live our lives.
- New social norms are accepted, ignored, or rejected every day.
- Memes can be used to embrace or alienate a person within a social circle.
- Practices and mores help society maintain social order and control.
- The cult of personality draws people to celebrities and others in the public eye.
Pornography is the depiction of something or someone performing an act a viewer could interpret as sexual. It is subjective in nature.
- Procreation, pleasure, and power are universally accepted memes behind why we have sex.
- The major sexual memes are based on a series of assumptions that are also memes.
- What is and isn’t pornography is in the eye of the beholder.
- Pornography creates, promotes, and destroys memes.
- The Internet has expanded the number of sexual memes.
For Moses and the Ten Commandments:
- God is the memetic engineer—the creator of the meme itself.
- The hook, or what makes the meme enticing, is God’s credibility. This isn’t a random list. God has a lot of street cred!
- The bait, or reward for accepting the meme, is that following these rules will give the believer guaranteed salvation; more cynically, not following these rules will earn you guaranteed damnation.
- The vector, or the impartial medium used to transport the meme, is the tablets themselves. The slabs of stone didn’t care whether there were 50 commandments or 5 listed.
- The host, or the deliverer of the meme, is Moses himself.
- The memotype, or request of the meme, are the Ten Commandments.
- The sociotype, or actual expression of the meme, are people treating themselves and others differently in accordance with the Ten Commandments.
- Spirituality cannot be passed on, but religion is by nature a meme.
- Religious memes usually are simplified and removed from their original context.
- Religious memes can be used to justify nearly any action.
- Most major religions have a leader who serves as the host for the religious meme.
- People usually learn of new religions through sound bites, not from studying the material.
A soapbox is the collection of ideas a politician stands for during a particular campaign. The most successful soapboxes have memes that create a particular overarching theme.
- Slogan memes are best when they are brief and memorable.
- Soapboxing occurs when a politician publicly defends his or her socioplex for the future.
- Successful politics requires compromising idealized memes.
- Simple memes are better used for getting into office; then, complex memes can be shared.
- The Internet has become a major tool for giving and receiving political messages.
The term mark comes from hucksters on turn-of-the-century boardwalks and midways. If a grifter spotted a guy or gal who seemed dumb enough to part with their money, he would come close and discretely mark the person’s back with chalk. The other cons would then know that the person passing by was an easy mark.
An advance-fee scam requires the potential victim, or mark, to give the con money on the promise of getting more money back. Like a true scam meme, the grifter is lying about the money available and disappears after receiving the victim’s cash. If the con suspects a particularly greedy victim, he or she will likely up the ante and suggest a bigger investment to get more money out of the mark.
A conspiracy theory is the usually far-fetched idea that an organization or group is manipulating weaker individuals. From a memetic perspective, it is usually a meme-complex or memeplex (see Chapter 14) that carries within itself auto-immune memes that attempt to protect the memeplex from infection by other memes.
One of the most effective ways of protecting itself is to cause the host to believe that any criticism of the memeplex is itself part of the conspiracy. Evidence against the theory is merely held up as proof of how wide-ranging the conspiracy is.
- Scams are carried out for money while hoaxes are usually committed for attention.
- The popular Nigerian Scam goes back at least to the sixteenth century.
- Ponzi schemes take from one victim to pay the previous victim.
- Urban legends blossomed as more people moved from the country to the city.
- Conspiracy theories are created when people believe a memeplex is suppressing the truth—usually about dastardly deeds.
Symbiotic means the relationship between two things (usually beneficial). In memes, the term describes the co-meme or symmeme relationship, when two ideas build and feed off each other.
- Memes can infect other memes, changing their original meanings or purposes, as when a protest song is used to promote war or a peaceful religion inspires an unforgiving belief system.
- A meme change can be effected deliberately or through the natural selection of the meme.
- Memes can evolve together, forming more virulent strains that are even harder to resist.
- Sometimes parts of a meme can be neutralized so that what once was a powerful political message can become merely an empty tradition.
- Connected retromemes are called co-memes or symmemes.
- Two or more memes can work together to support each other.
- Large groups of memes are called a memeplex.
- Some memeplexes use bait, such as an appetizing reward and the fulfillment of a primitive need, to snare a host willing to spread the meme.
- Meta-memes are memes that refer to other memes.
- Memeplexes reject or eliminate conflicting memes to survive.
A memebot is a person completely controlled by a meme. It is an obsession with a particular cultural idea.
- The Aesop fable “Chicken Little” illustrates the doomsday meme perfectly.
- Doomsday memes can give leaders power through the fear they create.
- The 2012 doomsday meme originated from a Mayan calendar prophecy.
- Doomsday meme followers get security from supposedly knowing how human life will end.
- Some scientists have connected planetary events to 2012, but there is scant evidence that any major event will happen that year.
A dormant meme is a meme left with no host because the last carrier either died or stopped believing in the idea. It can be resurrected, however, usually through another active meme.
- Memes die when the last host dies or forgets the meme.
- Memes also die if people simply stop believing them and stop spreading them.
- Some memeplexes carry strong defenses against death by disbelief and can survive long after most people cease to believe in them.
- If a meme leaves a written trace, it is possible that it can be resurrected.
- Memes can sometimes be resurrected by another thriving meme.
An auto-toxic meme is one that encourages behavior that is dangerous or even fatal to its host.
There are two signs of a potential auto-toxic meme:
- It encourages suicide.
- It encourages reckless behavior.
An exo-toxic meme is one that is dangerous or fatal to other people.
A signature is a distinct action a criminal creates at a crime scene. It comes from a need to be recognized for his or her work. Criminal psychologists claim that nearly every “bad guy” has one. In fact, a copycat crime is defined by the signature of an act—the duplication of the original meme.
- Auto-toxic memes are dangerous or fatal to the host.
- Exo-toxic memes harm people other than the host.
- Much of the behavior of religious cults can be considered memetically.
- Terrorism has many causes, but memes play a considerable role.
- A memeoid is someone who is connected to a meme that can definitely harm him or her.
- Memes can act like infections.
- At certain times, we are more susceptible to meme infection.
- There are ways to treat meme infection, but sometimes treatment only makes it worse.
- The best defense against memes is understanding how different ones work.
- A meme sometimes hides within a more desirable meme, à la the Trojan horse.
A meme allergen relates to the medical term “allergen,” which is any foreign substance that causes an extreme reaction in the body’s immune system. A meme allergen may cause surprising and excessive responses that seem completely out of proportion to the stimulus.
White man’s burden is the belief that the race in power must help the “less-sophisticated” race with the socio-economic and/or intellectual disadvantage. The term comes from an 1899 Rudyard Kipling poem of the same name. The poem pushed for colonization of lesser cultures, and it’s still unclear whether the English author of The Jungle Book meant it as satire or truth. But, like most popular memes, it doesn’t really matter—the idea has taken on a life of its own, and believers apply it as they see fit.
- A meme allergen is a situation that causes an extreme reaction in someone.
- Cultural factors, such as wealth and education, can affect how people will react to meme allergens.
- In extreme cases, reactions to memes can lead to hatred and violence.
- Deep-seated memes can make it seem that certain situations are natural, rather than the result of memes.
- Altruistic actions toward one’s own kind can turn into racist behavior.
A totalizing system is one that claims to provide all the answers to a complex set of problems without reference to any other system. All issues and facts, therefore, are part of that system regardless of their origin, and if any beliefs don’t fit the system, they are dismissed as irrelevant.
- The best defense against a pernicious meme is good general knowledge and a healthy skepticism.
- Even good memeplexes can cause problems if they refuse to acknowledge alternative opinions.
- Remain alert to the memes that you host, and constantly test them against available evidence.
- Science, politics, and religion are meme-based and can be blocked by immuno-memes.
- There are six primary immuno-memes: conservatism, orthodoxy, science, radicalism, nihilism, and adaptation.
Lamarckian refers to the work of French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whose early—and now largely discredited—theories on biological evolution included the belief that the environmental development of characteristics, such as the building of muscle tissue, could be passed on to later generations.
Cultural transmission, in terms of DIT, means that aspects of culture—thought, speech, action, and artifacts—are transmitted from individual to individual in a way analogous to biological reproduction. In other words, there is the possibility that the reproduction may be imperfect, that a mutation may occur, and that the cultural unit takes on the effects of that mutation, which it passes on when it is next reproduced. It also acknowledges that cultural traits are subject to natural selection—that in a crowded and busy world, some things will prosper and others will be ignored.
Phenotypic plasticity is the way in which an organism can alter its behavior, physical shape, growth, or population characteristics in reaction to certain environmental pressures. It can be expressed either across generations of a species or in a single individual. A good example is the way in which frog tadpoles forage less and grow larger tails (for speed in escaping) in the presence of predators, at the cost of slower growth, while foraging more and growing faster in the presence of competitors, at the cost of being more vulnerable should those predators show up.
Syntactic and semantic are both terms from theoretical linguistics. Syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in language—grammar, in other words. Semantics is the study of the meaning that is produced by those grammatical constructions. Sentences in written English can be incorrect grammatically but still meaningful as well as syntactically correct but meaningless.
- The first written mention of memes was by biologist Richard Wolfgang Semon in 1904.
- Anthropologist F. Ted Cloak, Jr. described memelike “cultural instructions,” or ideas passed through society.
- Meme theory is based on Darwinism, or the idea that culture naturally evolves based on new needs.
- Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene focused on evolution and biology but spurred an interest in memes.
- Philosopher Daniel Dennett argued that memes modified themselves as much as genes, through evolution.
Paradigm shift is the idea that scientific development continues incrementally, building on previous research and ideas, until the underlying theories and assumptions can no longer support the new evidence and a new way of thinking is required. The most famous example of a paradigm shift is the Copernican revolution, which placed the sun at the center of the solar system—replacing the Ptolemaic model, which was becoming increasingly over-elaborate in an attempt to match the theory to the observations. The term was coined by American scientist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
- Memetics has developed far beyond the speculations of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.
- Newer theories have emphasized different aspects of memetics, such as the focus on contagion.
- An understanding of memetics is crucial for a full understanding of human evolution.
- Susan Blackmore, Aaron Lynch, and Richard Brodie all propose different meme theories.
- The newer theories are still trying to reconcile cultural and genetic evolutions.
Platonic essentialism is the principle that there exists a perfect version of every physical object and human idea in an inaccessible, metaphysical realm and that objects and ideas in the physical realm are mere copies or representations of this ideal form.
Postmodernism, as it is popularly understood, is a complex of theories derived from philosophy, literary criticism, linguistics, and other disciplines, which share a general suspicion of “grand narratives” such as progress and reason, and which claim that what classical philosophy saw as an external reality is merely a baseless layering of culturally defined and arbitrary meanings. There is no “truth”; there is only spectacle.
A culturgen is an idea, historical within a social group or advanced by an individual, that is passed on physically or mentally. Coined by biologist E. O. Wilson, it is comparable to a meme.
- Some theorists have pointed out problems with memetics.
- The theory of Universal Darwinism is opposed by some biologists.
- Meme theory is still worth pursuing.
- Several competing theories exist with both similarities and differences.
- Because they are conceptual, theories supporting and arguing against memes are hard to prove.