Memes

A meme¹ is an idea, behavior, style or anything that spreads from person to person within a culture. Meme carries cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Examples of memes: skills, stories, songs, fashion, melodies, catch-phrases, methods of engineering, mindful practices.

Large groups of memes that are occurring, being copied and passed on together are called co-adapted meme complexes, or memeplexes. Examples of such can be cultural or political doctrines, political systems or religions and cults – Christianity, Buddhism, Capitalism, Socialism, …

Culture, complexes of behaviors, rituals are not easy to understand by looking at their smaller parts. Therefore is hard to talk about meme as a unit as it can be either a part of something larger or it can be something composed of smaller parts. The distinction between meme and memetic complex can not be always obvious and might depend on multiple factors and point of views. Because of that, we can consider a meme to be a holon² – a part and a whole at the same time. When we are using word 'meme' in this text we might mean either an unit or a complex, as almost all of the discussed concepts can be applied to both.

Meme can be thought as a combination of an idea, and it's behavior which requires context of carrier, environment and observer. It also requires a condition that the behavior has effect on the environment observable by the observer. “Memes" are not just any ideas or thoughts – they are ideas with outward expression. We can compare the outward behaviour and actions as a result of inward realisation of a meme to a phenotype of a gene. The effect of the behavior on the environment or the expression of the meme can be thought as a "phenotype" of a meme in a similar way as an animal is a phenotype of a gene. Thus we can consider a dam as the extended phenotype of a beaver or culture as the extended phenotype of the collective memeotypes of humanity.

Understanding of this concept of memes and their expression/phenotypes helps us to understand effects of teachings and beliefs, understand importance of how we carry out our actions – how are they observed? how are they copied?.

Replication

Memes are copied by teaching, imitation, sharing through digital media and other methods. They generally replicate through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient copiers of information and behavior. The copies of memes does not have to be perfect and variation might be introduced either intentionally or not. We can think of replication of a meme as of a process of preservation of the meme through time.

The psychologist, Thorndike defined imitation as "learning to do an act from seeing it done". In imitation a new behaviour is learned by copying it from someone else. We are distinguishing between simple or spontaneous contagion and other kinds of learning or direct knowledge transfer.

Memes persistence depend on replication, therefore the indivisible part of the concept is the immitation. That excludes from memes things such as perceptions, emotional states, cognitive maps, experiences in general, or "anything that can be the subject of an instant of experience".³

It is important to note that reproduction might happen without intention. Even economic systems or political doctrines can spread through spontaneous contagion which might be misinterpreted for conspiracies with a person or a group of people driving the process of replication.

Evolution

Original idea of memes was described from the point of view of cultural evolution analogouts to a genetic evolution. Memetic or cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission in that, although basically conservative, it can give rise to a form of evolution.

• Spontaneous evolution – accidental changes that give rise to new

  qualities of memes

• Aided or engineered evolution – intentional modifications of the

  memes

We are not going to spend time here with the evolutionary aspect of the memes. We just want to note that it can be observed and influenced. If the reader is interested, we suggest reaching out for a literature which discusses the topic in more depth.

Memes and Immunity

Immunity is important concept of the memetic framework. There are two kind-of competing immunity mechanisms: immunity of a meme or immunity of a meme carrier (usually a person).

Complexes of memes, such as social systems, doctrines, religions might include memes which purpose is to prevent foreign memes to alter core structure and content of the complex. Example of such immune mechanism might be written recommendation for distinction between "believers" and "non-believers" where the later would be considered not trustworthy.

Person's ability to recognize, evaluate and then potentially reject inclusion of memes into one's repertoire is the opposite side of the immunity mechanism.

It has to be noted, that this might be result of very complex memetic inventory of the person, however if can't clearly attribute the reason for rejection or non-acceptance, we can say that it is the person's ability to do so.

Examples of immunity mechanisms that might lead to rejection of foreign memes:

• Decreased trust towards foreign meme carriers as members of "the

  other" group

• Increased assurance about superiority of one's own memes are immune

  mechanisms

• Rule for not questioning the meme itself as it is.

• Practice of non-attachment

Application

The framework of memes can be applied or used in multiple domains, such as viral marketing, cultural evolution, history of ideas or social analytics.

Memes are good explanatory framework. It get us thinking about why some ideas or behaviors are successful or what makes them good at replication. Also helps as to recognize feedback mechanisms in relation to memes.

Conclusion

If we want to have effect on the world that goes beyond generation or two, understanding this mechanism is valuable. We might have a great idea about how the world should look like. But how we make sure that the idea will persist in time over generations? Part of the answer is in understanding mechanisms beyond “memes”.

Reading

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memeplex

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics

• Richard Dawkins – Selfish Gene

• http://www.baillement.com/texte-blakemore.pdf

  • From the conclusion:

  • *My argument has been that the definition of the meme depends

    on, and should depend on, the concept of imitation. Therefore,
    only those things that can be passed on by imitation should
    count as memes.
    
    This means we can immediately exclude many things that a few
    authors have confusingly included as memes, such as
    perceptions, emotional states, cognitive maps, experiences in
    general, or "anything that can be the subject of an instant
    of experience". Furthermore we can build on the long history
    of research in animal behaviour to distinguish imitation from
    contagion, and from individual and social learning, and so to
    eliminate from memetics the catching of yawns or all the many
    things we each learn for ourselves, by ourselves.*

• http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/Memetics-Springer.pdf

  (from Principia Cybernetica)

  • Rufus: A short review article arguing for the value of memes and

    summarizing some of the more detailed concepts as well as
    elaborating some (very limited) empirical evidence for
    meme models.