Thread:User talk:Nebuchadnezzar/Memes/reply (22)

Not quite -- crank magnetism would be a process or mechanism. Which reminds me of another reason I don't like this biological analogy. The genesis of memetics was essentially Dawkins' attempt to apply the "selfish gene" perspective to culture and ideas. While that metaphor is useful in genetics, I don't think it is at all in anthropology/psychology/sociology. In a way, it's more accurate to say people use memes rather than vice-versa -- going back to conspiracy theories, while they are often maladaptive in certain ways, they also serve purposes such as justifying or rationalizing failure or lending coherence to randomness which creates psychological comfort (note Goertzel and others find conspiracy theories to be more popular among disaffected people). The idea that the meme is using the person to spread itself doesn't make much sense in many of the contexts its applied. I think this comes up in the memetics episode of Rationally Speaking and it's part of Atran's critique in terms of religion (his paper on memetics is recycled as a chapter in In Gods We Trust), which is that the memetics view tends to look at the direct cost to the "host" of "carrying" a meme, but overlook indirect benefits to the host. And, going back to fidelity, it also tends to overlook the fact that the form of something is often copied rather than the substance, or cases where, as Marshall McLuhan famously said, "the medium is the message."

I do like the "meme" as a sort of generic placeholder variable for a basic idea or simple "imitatable"/"copyable" action that can be used as part of a model, more or less like you did with the essay on language, so I'm probably preaching to the choir here. Though when you get to that point, the meme is mostly shorn of all the pseudo-evolutionary technobabble surrounding it and its explanatory value as a theoretical framework. You could say I like memes but not memetics.