Memes
Memes
Just a clarification. You say you often find memetics and memes to be a but woo-y or pseudoscience-y... but are you just objecting to things like applying natural selection to them? As in, do you accept it as a decent enough word for talking about social attitudes and how they bolt on to each other and how some ideas tend to be more compatible with others because they share similar "memes"?
Because I tend to use it more in that latter sense, as a form of analysis more than anything, and am wondering if there's a better set of terminology out there.
My problem with the former is the mis-application of natural selection to ill-defined cultural "units." And when you get into claiming that the big brain evolved as a "meme machine" a la Blackmore, you're really into crank territory. While the latter is a pretty metaphor, it is more or less a watered-down version of the concept of sign.
Maybe I'm a hundred years behind, but aren't "memes" just a made up term to help organize the way we think, and the way ideas spread?
On of my instinctive bristles about much of this cognitive vocab is the sense that people use these concepts (chunking, memes, seeding) as if they are "things" that actually exist in the world, rather than descriptions of how we as humans process the world.
ADK, when you talk about applying memetics to actual natural selection, then you take them out of the context of a social construction and make (individual memes, i think?) them "real" as if they can be acted upon by biology rather than social structure. Or am i again, lost, 20 years behind?
I figured that being so hard to define as "individual" groups would make adding natural selection a little difficult to formalise.
But isn't a Sign something in the real world, that triggers a response, while a Meme would be what goes on in our heads, and then "kinda" (in the fuzziest possible sense) spread over a society too.
The idea is that memes are analogous to genes, so they replicate and natural selection acts on them in a cultural form. It's a kind of pseudo-evolutionary analogy, something like a linguistic social Darwinism. In its more extreme forms, meme theory is anti-evolutionary because it ignores or denies the evolved cognitive architecture of the brain/mind (see esp. Atran's critique on the memetics page). This is why "memetics" is not really taken seriously in the cognitive literature -- it's not really cog psych at all, more of pop-culture phenomenon, evolution as ideology.
That makes sense. Atran's critique is interesting, certainly the idea behind it rests entirely on how well the genetics analogy holds - and it doesn't too far, particularly in fidelity of transmission. I've never taken the analogy literally, but there's something to be said for the differences in "horizontal" and "vertical" transmission that makes it less applicable.
I can see why it's attractive as an explanation, particularly to the likes of Dawkins with an evolutionary background. But once you've mashed it up with certain caveats, "natural selection" probably isn't exactly the best way of looking at it.
So I'm curious, since i've not paid much attention to memes other than Dawkins book. Is the argument that humans have done this for all of written history? or is it only a modern thing when people have a more instant access to ideas and spreading them around the world.
From what I can tell, that you can't really distinguish that is part of the problem - otherwise wouldn't you not conclude that animals would somehow be susceptible to memetics? The only thing where it seems to have any concrete definition is as "internet meme".
Like I said, I've always been dubious and never really bought the idea - but equally have not read more than the most sketchy outlines or comments. It's an interesting metaphore, yes... it's just the way I hear people throwing it about "I will not subcum to your meme". "I'm over that meme now", seems almost a way for them (generally internet geeks and nerds like the folks on wiki or RW) to put some (any) idea into a classification as "popular idea everyone is buying into". Ie., in their parlance, right or wrong, "memes" are things you don't think about, you just have or do not have.
A meme is an idea. why did it have to become something *more* than a idea? I guess that's my problem.
Today I am talking about the "purpleization of downtown". it's an idea. when, why, or how does it become a "meme"?
Depends on who you want to market your pop science book to.
Will it sell more if it's a "meme" and not just an "idea"?
I would put my money on "yes," because "ideas" are old, boring, and stuffy. "Memes" are new, fashionable, and better yet, they are ScienceTM!
I think there is a study somewhere that shows books sell better if they seem to make up a new word to describe something. I might be pulling it out of my arse, but I'm sure I recall something along those lines...
Well, it sounds right, so it must be true!
"Truthoficty and audiosim: understanding the importance of being truth when you speak" (it sounds right, therefore it is).
Isn't the scientific term for that truthiness?
you said "new words" truthiness was coined already. i needed Truthoficity! It's the validity of the truth of truthiness!
Yeah, like I said, I've seen some interesting things done with things like "meme maps," but at that point the "meme" is so far from its original intention that it doesn't really much resemble the original analogy at all and its purpose becomes more descriptive than explanatory ("meme of the gaps," if you will). As for memetics as a "science," add that to the scrapheap of cultural evolutionary history.
To me "meme maps" and memeplexes were always the most intriguing prospect. Like imagining putting together a jigsaw to make your own image, but only certain pieces can actually slot together with each other well, so some combinations (memeplexes) are more stable than others. I found in interesting that some ideas would just drag others for the ride because they were more compatible than others. But still, defining the individual units makes that a little difficult so it ends up a bit too fuzzy.
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.
Crank magnetism would be like the type species for this sort of thing!
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.
Or, shorter version of this entire spiel, memes are a kind of pseudo-biological reinvention of A.O. Lovejoy's "unit ideas."
Why the fuck are they not just "popular ideas". why must they be "special" kinds of "units" of ideas. or "memes" of ideas.
Pouts.
One of the things I actually like about memes is that they encompass both ideas and actions (sign does this as well, though often in subtly different ways). The notion of "idea" itself almost seems spiritual to me, like some kind of disembodied essence. One of the themes of postmodernism (the parts that weren't absolute gibberish, anyway) was the connection between ideas and actions, especially Foucault's concept of "power/knowledge." Many discoveries in psychology also demonstrate this, again, as in rationalization, in which ideas are not thought up for their intrinsic value but "generated" as a social tool to deal with some predicament.
I'm sure half the art of academia is creating new labels to hide what you mean from the Great Unwashed.
Does the other half involve saying "Ignore that man behind the curtain!"?
It's occurred to me that the link in my last post needs some context. The ABA is the American Bar Association, which has recently come under fire for marketing law degrees as the most employable money-making degree on earth, when in fact most law graduates are living in cardboard boxes lined with letters demanding interest payments on their $120,000 student loan debt. (I may have exaggerated a bit...)
by the way, did i tell you that last night I had a dream about the most amazing thing ever. it was sorta roundish, but there were these support beams in the middle. and teh whole point of it was to let it roll, so you could put something on it, and it too would roll.
do you know what kind of money i can make, if only i can get someone to patent that? I think i shall name it circular rollinging thingy.
this is a magnet with a handle, to make it powerful?
(don't blame me, please. I'm stoned on decongestants and anti histomenes)
Been meaning to ask something for a while, kinda forgot. Concerning the fidelity of transmission problem, would it not be this that forms the basis of the selection effect rather than memes dying off a la natural selection?
Consider the "memeplex" of driving a car; it's composed of smaller units like "this is the peddle to make it go", "this is the gear stick", "this is what you do when you see this traffic sign" and so on. Obviously if fidelity of transmission of the entire memeplex was high, we'd only ever need one driving lesson. Obviously this isn't the case. But some of the sub-units do transfer quickly and effectively, and are learned in the first lesson. These individual pieces that do transfer over quickly are obviously either "easy" or somehow what someone is most receptive to. So, in fact, is it this lack of fidelity of memeplexes (or whatever you wish to call them) that actually causes a selection, rather than something like natural selection?
So you're saying only the simplest "memes" are "selected"?
No, that all "memes" would actually be simple enough to transfer, Any complicated piece of cultural information can be broken down into smaller ideas - although, as always, defining the "smallest unit of cultural information" is difficult, if not impossible to do, which is the major inherent problem. The memes that propagate successfully would be the ones that find a good home on the receiving side, i.e., someone most willing and accepting of them. We're well aware that people are picky and choosy over what aspects of a religion they take on board. So when trying to assimilate the Bible some people will happily latch onto the parts that say gay sex is wrong, but will happily ignore the bit about shellfish.
Yeah, the definition of meme itself has been one of the big points of contention. The gear shift for example -- is this even one singular meme? Why not the individual settings of "drive," "reverse," "park," etc.? Memetics proponents tend to give handwavey responses along the lines of "Ah, but it doesn't have to be so well-defined to be useful." True enough, but that part about actually being useful is pretty important. Memetic approaches haven't actually shown to have any advantage over previous models such as gene-culture co-evolution.
Yeah, you see you can do things like gene-centered evolution when you can actually point to a gene and draw a ring around it.
That is pretty handy isn't it? My main problem, though, isn't that they don't "exist" per se -- lots of models don't truly exist in the "real" world, but they do provide useful predictions. I can't see the useful aspect of memetics. It doesn't give much in the way of predictive value, and what predictions it does make seem to end up being either trivial and tautological (ideas spread, no shit!) or totally cranky and false (e.g., Blackmore's contention that the big brain evolved as a "meme machine," a just-so story if there ever was one).
Prediction is the problem. Although I suppose the prediction is that ideas that can be most easily bolted onto someone's existing beliefs will spread more than others. Thought that's almost so obvious it's not worth stating. I just like it in terms of how you can break ideas down into smaller units and see what looks the same in apparently very different activities. Then there's no more need for it to predict anything than music notation needs to predict anything, really. Again, handwavey, but no prediction is better than predictive qualities that are useless.
Though as another point, until we've hacked the brain apart and can understand it I don't think we can call the brain an anything machine. We have ideas about how it works, but the intricate details you need to know to call it a "meme machine" just aren't available yet. You never know, perhaps the neural networks that flash up with ideas will be analogous to genes in that you can point to them and draw a ring around them, then we'll have found the "meme", but that's not terribly likely.
If it has no predictive power, it's not exactly a science in and of itself then, is it? I guess there are somewhat meme-like units in memory psychology called chunks, which are defined by their associational strength with other chunks, e.g. in a random assortment of letters ("ahnwvsnxccd"), each letter would count as a chunk, but familiar abbreviations ("JFK NASA UK CIA KGB") would count as one chunk because of their associations.