Meme: a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes.
Or so it used to be. I remember a time when memes were exciting. Units of cultural information. The viral (r)evolution. I recently declared that “memes died in 2005″ which created a lot of controversy among my readers. How can memes be dead?
I think that memes are dead because we no longer live in a culture where the strongest memes survive. We live in a culture that I have dubbed the great mashup of nothing. A perfect example would be the website Tumblr in which 90% of its users are rebloggers. They repost the images and videos of other users (Tumblr makes this very easy and even promotes itself based on this) without creating any original content. Are these people posting powerful memes that are generating into something greater? I think not.
It seems like everyone on the Internet acts like a 14 year old troll. Can I haz my culture back? I don’t think that lolcats are funny. They might as well symbolize the death of memetics. The fittest memes are parody macros. Can we say cyber-idiocracy?
From my readers:
“I hate how the term has been misused recently to describe internet cliches, macros, and just about anything else online.” -Dire Deparra
“This is something I’ve never been comfortable with. How does this word ‘meme’ come to mutate from being a concept Dawkins used to track cultural changes to being internet slang for ‘running joke’?” -Robert Bisno
If you would like to understand memetics I recommend reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (also author of The God Delusion) or The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore. I met Susan at a convention once (isn’t her dyed hair adorable?) and we talked for a bit about what memes had turned into. Was this evolution? I wish I had recorded our conversation. Dawkins and Blackmore did not envision graphics of slapstick violence as the future of memetics.
You can also check out their websites (Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore) to find out what memetics are really about. Let’s not let the evolution of ideas be killed by this new stampede of maggots.
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2 Comments
I find this needlessly cynical, and coming from me, that’s impressive. I think I have about the same number of books on my shelf about biology as I do about new media, and I’ve made the same argument about the misuse of the word “meme”, but I’ve softened on it over time. It was close enough in meaning to a concept in need of a name, so I don’t entirely object to the repurposing — an entirely new word would have been less easily understood, and the first users would have had some idea of the way it was originally used by Dawkins.
The originally described process still occurs, and the nature of content, social and otherwise, continues to evolve as ever. So I would argue that people are using the term “meme” too superficially, to describe say, single instances of mutations that will inevitably be absorbed and have no greater impact, but… meh. Let them. The words we use to describe reality define the ways in which we can describe reality, a tautology. I don’t buy it when anyone says they change anything concrete about reality itself, and I can always bring my own bucket of words.
Reposted content in context is new content. Agree or disagree?
Either way, we have always consumed information. Tumblr documents the consumption of information, which was previously much more difficult (though scrapbooks have been around forever). Nothing new is happening, but now we’ve got records. I can only approve of anything that creates new data. I don’t believe the overall amount of original content has decreased whatsoever. I don’t necessarily believe that it can decrease.
Most people don’t contribute anything “great”, but that has always been true, and content we find irrelevant is easy enough to avoid. Another reason so many people on the internet seem to behave like 14-year-old trolls: they are 14-year-old trolls. Solution: don’t spend time on Tumblr or 4chan where they convene. I was lame online when I was that age, too.
Suzan Blackmore talk is one of my favorite TED talk. Will probably look forward to read her book. Anyway good stuff you got there.
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[...] years I’ve been nailing the death of the Internet into the coffin. I recently posted about The Death of Memetics and was all but ready to give up on creating any sort of digital revolution. The cancer had spread [...]
[...] years I’ve been nailing the death of the Internet into the coffin. I recently posted about The Death of Memetics and was all but ready to give up on creating any sort of digital revolution. The cancer had spread [...]