Memes

[William the Bastard]

I saw a program a while back that was explaining the psychology between man and ape and the theory of memes was introduced. I had never heard of them before, but I now think they make a lot of sense. Heres a link to wiki.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
It's a bit long winded but I would like to see what other people make of it.

[TheKwas]

Cool concept and certainly has it's valid points, I just object to it's study as a 'science' simply because it can't be falsified. Aspects of it can certainly be injected into scientific models, but the field itself is philosophical.

[Hells Bells]

http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/Meme

memes are like figures of speech methinks, their use is the same.

[TheKwas]

Nope. Memes are any cultural aspect that can be reproduced. Ideas are memes, as are catchphrases and fads/trends.

The concept of memes started when Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, was outlining his (actually Hamilton's but lets keep it simple) 'Selfish Gene Theory' where he argued that natural selection acts upon genes rather than individuals or groups. He wanted to use an analogy that could illustrate the power of such a theory, and found it in 'memes' (pronouced 'Meem' not 'Mee-mee'). Memes start, reproduce and can spread rapidly through our culture, but what determines the success of a meme is it's ability to reproduce, it has to be 'catchy' (in the case of catchphrases) or emotionally-driven (sympathy towards nationalism?) or just generally something people want to share with others. If the meme doesn't posses this quality, it dies out of the population. There is a sort of natural selection in our culture in regards to memes.

Essentially, memes are anything in culture that are able to reproduce themselves and spread by being manipulative enough (through catchiness, logic, or whatever) to make humans want to reproduce them. It is really a 'gene' of culture.

[Simetrical]

Cool concept and certainly has it's valid points, I just object to it's study as a 'science' simply because it can't be falsified. Aspects of it can certainly be injected into scientific models, but the field itself is philosophical.

The concept as a whole can't be falsified only because its basic assumption is self-evidently true. All that's required for the term itself to be meaningful is for ideas to undergo some kind of natural selection, which it can be demonstrated they do. But that's very general and not very useful, much like saying that the statement "the world follows fixed natural laws" encompasses physics. The thing to see will be whether anyone will find novel results in memetics that haven't already been covered under studies of psychology, advertising, propaganda, etc. that don't bear the "meme" label.

[TheKwas]

All that's required for the term itself to be meaningful is for ideas to undergo some kind of natural selection, which it can be demonstrated they do.

Agreed, but how do you conduct controlled scientific experiments on memetics while retaining falsifiable? I suppose we can prove that memes exist, but how do we scientifically observe memes in action? Perhaps there is a way to do so, but I can't really think of a full-proof way to do so, and I don't think there exists a single case study on memes since the Selfish Gene. It is a useful way at looking at things, and I trust that memes are very real and we can study them, but in a soft-science manner.

The thing to see will be whether anyone will find novel results in memetics that haven't already been covered under studies of psychology, advertising, propaganda, etc. that don't bear the "meme" label.

I would imagine that merely illuminating the results that have been previously uncovered through those studies would make memes useful enough. The way of looking at such issues, at least for me, seems to make the concepts easier to grasp and the perceptive much more enriching.

[Simetrical]

Agreed, but how do you conduct controlled scientific experiments on memetics while retaining falsifiable? I suppose we can prove that memes exist, but how do we scientifically observe memes in action? Perhaps there is a way to do so, but I can't really think of a full-proof way to do so, and I don't think there exists a single case study on memes since the Selfish Gene. It is a useful way at looking at things, and I trust that memes are very real and we can study them, but in a soft-science manner.

Oh, certainly a soft-science manner. Generating entirely original ideas and trying to get them to propagate in the wild would be a rather uncontrolled but potentially modestly successful way to go, given reasonable sample sizes. Alternatively, less realistic but more controllable scenarios could be used, with memes discreetly imparted to test subjects who could later be asked if they told anyone about them, say, or tested directly somehow for willingness to pass them on, or what modifications they made to them, or whatever. The application to entire populations will require fuzzier methods, but certainly some principles could be worked out in detail in the lab. Memetics is essentially a specialized corner of psychology that hasn't received much attention yet as such, although it's been investigated under other guises.

[eventhorizen]

What about something like advertising and PR studies, or cultural phenomena like the spread and adoption of ringtones. Obviously this is inherantly 'forced' meme spread and transfer, but would not studies related to these fields be useful in a more general study of memetics?

Why not try an experiment right here, such as creating a nonesense phrase and seeing how it spreads, forced and unforced. A "spread this meme!" signature for example.

[Ummon]

The conceopt of meme is interesting. In truth, it's probably not-so-precise. Surely not-so-new.

[TheKwas]

No, it's not new at all actually. German biologist Richard Semon essentially came up with the same thing and called it 'mneme' (memory) in the 1904, as the Wikipedia article notes. Of course, Richard Dawkins came up with his version seperately (as far as we know *shifty eyes*) and was the one who actually popularized it.

[Ummon]

Oh yes, Semon, the forgotten genius of memory studies.

Weber with his idealtype inspired Jung's archetypes.

Platonic ideas are the same stuff, give or take a few factors.

[TheKwas]

The more I think about it the more silly my first post seems to me. Memes could be shown false if every idea, internet picture and fad was self-inspired, but of course such a notion is self-evidently false, so memes are a fact in some sort of way. Different theories concerning memes could easily be shown false in experimental studies as mentioned by sim and event, and narrowing down on the specifics of memetics could be done.

I strike my first post from the record.