Thread:User talk:Nebuchadnezzar/Memes/reply (16)

This is something that the idea of "memes" makes it easier to think about in a certain way, which is why I don't think they're ipso facto wrong to use. A meme could be a little "factoid" and the memeplex what I would call a "narrative." For example, take 9/11 trutherism. Memes might include "fire can't melt steel," "what about Building 7?" etc. The memeplex, or narrative, would be 9/11 trutherism, and the "meta-memeplex" or "meta-narrative" would be a conspiratorial government. Research on crank magnetism (not a term of art in psych, but I want to make it one) shows that belief in one conspiracy theory, e.g., 9/11 trutherism, also correlates with higher belief in other conspiracy theories such as the moon landing hoax. So this demonstrates that the concept isn't entirely wrong.

However, as memes are something of a recycling of "sign," memeplexes are something of a simplified version of psychological schema. Frederic Bartlett used this idea to study memory and showed that facts that don't fit the schema are rewritten to conform to the schema or thrown out. "Memeplex" could be conceived as something of a generalized form of this.