All Your Media Are Belong To Us: An Analysis of the Cultural Connotations of the Internet Meme (original) (raw)
Related papers
Ryan M. Milner, The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media
International Journal of Communication, 2018
After Richard Dawkins (1976) first coined the term meme as a name for the cultural analog of the biological gene—the basic unit of cultural transmission—some imagined memetics as an entirely new approach to analyzing culture. In the early 2000s, the term meme was adopted in online subcultures, and ultimately in the wider English vernacular, to describe remixes and imitations of found media content. Noting that the basic informational properties of memes in Dawkins’ sense—their longevity, fecundity, and copy fidelity—were enhanced by digital media, Limor Shifman (2014) argued that Internet memes gave new theoretical viability to Dawkins’ original concept.
On Selfish Memes: culture as complex adaptive system
2004
He divines remedies against injuries; he knows how to turn serious accidents to his own advantage; whatever does not kill him makes him stronger. F. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (1908) Evolution is ubiquitous. It has become the language of as many as the scientific discussions in our civilization to day. The term was come from biology, explaining how and why we have biological system as we perceive, how our species become the only creatures to which the earth count on her life. But the highest potential in the idea of evolution is not merely in biological systems. The greatest role of the theories is now explaining the dynamic of our society and culture. The paper presents a still working of evolutionary process we are going on, and how cultures become selfish in order to sustain human living above earth: memetics.
Memes and Memetics ---The Materialist's Concession to Descartes.
In an attempt to counteract the contradictions inherent in any materialistic attempt to explain the mind/body problem Richard Dawkins has coined the word `meme.' The word 'meme' represents ideas that are replicated though imitation and therefore spread from one brain to another. Dawkins suggests that just as the gene increases its phenotypic influence through replication, so too, ideas spread their phenotype, and replicate, through imitation. Thus a unit of thought that's imitated is replicated. Meme is a term analogous to `gene' but representing the information contained in a mind rather than in a gene. Dawkins' disciple, Susan Blackmore, suggests that we humans are the servants, rather than the masters, of the meme:
Memes are currently playing a formative role in the externalising of cultural memory, acting as replicators of social, scientific and other knowledge and as core elements of Web 2.0 culture with its focus on creating and sharing user-generated content in a collaborative, globalizing context. More than other network phenomena memes may help us explain how the internet is structured, showing the extent to which its surface chaos is in reality a highly organized system of practices of dispersion and diffusion. Recent work has made clear that it is possible to employ the meme as a prism for understanding certain tendencies within social networking without embracing the whole set of implications ascribed to this new 'genre' over the years. On the whole, however, critics and scholars have rather neglected the semiotic dimension of meme communication, focussing on complexities of aesthetic form only where necessary and largely ignoring the instabilities of meaning-production in the process of remixing visual and written meme 'messages'. Categories such as "form", "content" or "stance" (L. Shifman) fail to convincingly explain how memes work as formulas of media contents, importing as they do a single authorial intelligence responsible for having processed all content individually and thus over-emphasizing the power of human agency. This project argues that it needs a solid understanding of semiotics to understand memes and the series of patterns they help shape and diffuse. As they are mostly dependent on embarrassing moments of visual capture, they cannot insist on having a primarily informational or even symbolical meaning. In fact, they are predicated on a signifying accident (or "third meaning", as Roland Barthes would have argued) any reader may take up and develop into a new and justifiable meaning. Evolving from a situationally bounded generating process, memes are also exemplars of a level of meaning-production Julia Kristeva has adequately termed "signifiance". Their innovation in terms of aesthetic form lies in their productive violence and their underscoring of the limits of socially useful discourse, pointing as they do to the semiotic and unconscious processes that exceed the subject and its rationalising processes.
Genes, Memes, and Cultural Heredity
Biology & Philosophy
Dick Lewontin's 1970 article on the units of selection was an influential and expansive watershed: it got people to look far more broadly for things which could undergo selection, show heredity, and evolve. The generality of his "Darwin's Principles" (section II.B below) and Donald Campbell's convergent (1965) "blind variation and selective retention" paradigm made it natural for people to look for things in psychological, social, and cultural processes which would also meet these conditions. Attempts to find biology in culture seems either to push towards sociobiological conclusions drawing connections between genetic and cultural varieties and practices, or towards a perception of cultural change as somehow analogous to biological evolutionary processes. Dick has resisted the latter with only slightly less energy than the former. And his scepticism has often been well justified. But I don't think it must be a shallow and unproductive metaphor. My views on cultural evolution are positive -with qualifications, but analyzing it is a massive multi-faceted and deep problem, which invites careful thought both about cultural processes, and about why evolution (and our theories of it) work as effectively as they have in biology. Cultural change is an evolutionary process, but one with many deep and important differences in fundamental machinery from that found in biology. We must attend to the rich complexities resulting from these differences so that when we begin simplifying, we know where that puts us within the broader problem space, and are primed to look out for the kinds of problems these simplifications induce.