The Meme as Meme (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The Meme as Meme (2015)

nautil.us

44 pointsdnetesn21 comments

> Richard Dawkins, the famous evolutionary biologist who coined the word “meme” in his classic 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, seemed bent on disowning the Internet variety, calling it a “hijacking” of the original term.

I'd hardly call the video where he calls it "hijacking" showing him "bent on disowning the Internet variety":

https://youtu.be/GFn-ixX9edg?t=4m8s

Nor his attitude to the word being "reappropriated by the internet"[1]:

    The meaning is not that far away from the original.
    It's anything that goes viral.

    In the original introduction to the word meme in the 
    last chapter of The Selfish Gene, I did actually use
    the metaphor of a virus.

    So when anybody talks about something going viral on
    the internet, that is exactly what a meme is and it 
    looks as though the word has been appropriated for a
    subset of that.

[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/richard-dawkins-memes

And he's absolutely correct. The article kind of lays out some tension between what could be analogized as artificial vs. natural selection which I don't think is actually there. The two types do happen, and often commingle, but I don't think it's a barrier to research as much as it is an opportunity.

I'm thinking of meme as a broader category than that, more of a trope.

Disclaimer: I'm not trying to hickack the term, but I think writing "disclaimer:" especially on HN is a meme, but not virulent.

There are loads of HN memes. "strawman" "true scotsman" "this is why we can't have nice things" etc.

Discussion of memes is always a little surreal for me, because I can never be quite sure what someone else means when they say the word. Probably because I encountered Dawkins' idea of a meme as a replicating unit of thought before "Internet Memes" existed. I start off assuming that others are using the term with my internal definition (i.e. correctly) but then encounter clues that they mean the internet-spread picture formats. However, there is rarely enough context to be certain which meaning is being used.

It makes me wonder how we communicate at all when no two people ever quite speak the same language. It also makes me a grammar nazi as I become aware of how important a uniform shared language is :)

Well that is super common in language, that the most common "sub-genre" of a word takes over the word itself, e.g. "pervert" now mostly meaning sexual pervert, chauvinist meaning male chauvinist, etc. As I understand it people on the autism spectrum are extra troubled by this. Although admittedly I'm also annoyed when people call these images memes even when they have not been virally spread.

It's a form of linguistic pollution.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/pollution

I think you overestimate the importance of a shared language having all its lexicon uniformized and I think you are mistaken that a word must have one and only one "correct" meaning.

> It makes me wonder how we communicate at all when no two people ever quite speak the same language.

You should read about Wiio's Laws: http://jkorpela.fi/wiio.html

Excellent reference, thanks.

> It also makes me a grammar nazi

More precisely, a usage nazi :-) :-) :-)

I agree with you, though. Unless and until it catches on, it's only a potential meme, not an actual meme.

I think you're doing yourself a disservice by defaulting to assuming "meme" means the biological definition. The "correct" definition of a word is however most people use it, not whatever internal definition you yourself have in your mind, nor whatever the dictionary happens to say.

It's not that simple. Sometimes people use a word in one or several ways, while expecting other people to use it in one or several different ways. And it hardly ever makes sense to count all people equally: you're probably more interested in how the people you personally communicate with use or understand a word than with how millions of people in a different country might use or understand the word. And lots of people speak several varieties of a language, or have different registers for different social situations. It can all get very complex, but a thorough lexicographer will attempt to understand and describe that complexity, rather than claim they can solve it all with some kind of majority vote. The concept of "correctness" exists in the heads of many speakers and is part of the linguistic reality that should be understood and described along with everything else.

That's the descriptivist view anyway.

There is no single correct definition for any word. And most people use words to that effect.

I don't see memes as infecting our minds so much as giving voice to something that is already there that doesn't come up in conversation. The Nike and Sweatshop meme wouldn't be funny if people didn't already know that Nike had faced charges of using sweatshops. We all have a friend who seems to have terrible luck, so when formalized as "Bad Luck Brian" it becomes a vehicle for finding humor in this.

Every word is a story and civilisation seems to be mostly motivated, right now, by the constant creation of new words.

Meme's are a consequence of the nature of our collective consciousness, wrapping up a big story into a simple, easily recognisable symbol and thus eventually, a word.

So we can't fault memes for being, because to do so is to ignore the means we can come to know ourselves, socially. This generation has memes; the 60's had them too. They're a naturally occurring consequence of collective reality.

"I don't see memes as infecting our minds " See also: Tide pods.

I like to combine Tide Pods with Ugandan Knuckles:

"Tide Pods are de way."

Dawkins' issue with basically natural vs. artificial selection of memes seems unnecessary as far as 'killing' the meme. There's interesting information there regardless of origin and methods of evolution - a shared lexicon is important (tangentially, in part that's what memes - Internet and otherwise - signify), when discussing memes I do try to distinguish via image memes that are passed on the Internet, classical memes, copypasta, etc.

It's really interesting research, and I don't think it's dead. Me and others built Danqex (formerly Nasdanq) partially to analyze trends and gather information to figure out the lifecycle of an Internet meme. I still also hold out hope that more formal research will continue in this area, whether academic or commercial.

An interesting tanget: when reading this Nautil.us article, they have an "Also in the Web" section where they recommend related articles, but they recommended I read the self-same article. Seems like they need to add an extra line of code to prevent this.

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