
The Meme as Meme (2015) - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/23/dominoes/the-meme-as-meme-rp
======
Tech-Noir
> Richard Dawkins, the famous evolutionary biologist who coined the word
> “meme” in his classic 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, seemed bent on disowning
> the Internet variety, calling it a “hijacking” of the original term.

I'd hardly call the video where he calls it "hijacking" showing him "bent on
disowning the Internet variety":

[https://youtu.be/GFn-ixX9edg?t=4m8s](https://youtu.be/GFn-ixX9edg?t=4m8s)

Nor his attitude to the word being "reappropriated by the internet"[1]:

    
    
        The meaning is not that far away from the original.
        It's anything that goes viral.
    
        In the original introduction to the word meme in the 
        last chapter of The Selfish Gene, I did actually use
        the metaphor of a virus.
    
        So when anybody talks about something going viral on
        the internet, that is exactly what a meme is and it 
        looks as though the word has been appropriated for a
        subset of that.
    

[1] [https://www.wired.co.uk/article/richard-dawkins-
memes](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/richard-dawkins-memes)

~~~
posterboy
I'm thinking of meme as a broader category than that, more of a trope.

Disclaimer: I'm not trying to hickack the term, but I think writing
"disclaimer:" especially on HN is a meme, but not virulent.

~~~
quickthrower2
There are loads of HN memes. "strawman" "true scotsman" "this is why we can't
have nice things" etc.

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ghkbrew
Discussion of memes is always a little surreal for me, because I can never be
quite sure what someone else means when they say the word. Probably because I
encountered Dawkins' idea of a meme as a replicating unit of thought before
"Internet Memes" existed. I start off assuming that others are using the term
with my internal definition (i.e. correctly) but then encounter clues that
they mean the internet-spread picture formats. However, there is rarely enough
context to be certain which meaning is being used.

It makes me wonder how we communicate at all when no two people ever quite
speak the same language. It also makes me a grammar nazi as I become aware of
how important a uniform shared language is :)

~~~
tw1010
I think you're doing yourself a disservice by defaulting to assuming "meme"
means the biological definition. The "correct" definition of a word is however
most people use it, not whatever internal definition you yourself have in your
mind, nor whatever the dictionary happens to say.

~~~
bloak
It's not that simple. Sometimes people use a word in one or several ways,
while expecting other people to use it in one or several different ways. And
it hardly ever makes sense to count all people equally: you're probably more
interested in how the people you personally communicate with use or understand
a word than with how millions of people in a different country might use or
understand the word. And lots of people speak several varieties of a language,
or have different registers for different social situations. It can all get
very complex, but a thorough lexicographer will attempt to understand and
describe that complexity, rather than claim they can solve it all with some
kind of majority vote. The concept of "correctness" exists in the heads of
many speakers and is part of the linguistic reality that should be understood
and described along with everything else.

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bitoneill
I don't see memes as infecting our minds so much as giving voice to something
that is already there that doesn't come up in conversation. The Nike and
Sweatshop meme wouldn't be funny if people didn't already know that Nike had
faced charges of using sweatshops. We all have a friend who seems to have
terrible luck, so when formalized as "Bad Luck Brian" it becomes a vehicle for
finding humor in this.

~~~
pharrington
"I don't see memes as infecting our minds " See also: Tide pods.

~~~
jrs95
I like to combine Tide Pods with Ugandan Knuckles:

"Tide Pods are de way."

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achileas
Dawkins' issue with basically natural vs. artificial selection of memes seems
unnecessary as far as 'killing' the meme. There's interesting information
there regardless of origin and methods of evolution - a shared lexicon is
important (tangentially, in part that's what memes - Internet and otherwise -
signify), when discussing memes I do try to distinguish via image memes that
are passed on the Internet, classical memes, copypasta, etc.

It's really interesting research, and I don't think it's dead. Me and others
built Danqex (formerly Nasdanq) partially to analyze trends and gather
information to figure out the lifecycle of an Internet meme. I still also hold
out hope that more formal research will continue in this area, whether
academic or commercial.

------
hawktheslayer
An interesting tanget: when reading this _Nautil.us_ article, they have an
"Also in the Web" section where they recommend related articles, but they
recommended I read the self-same article. Seems like they need to add an extra
line of code to prevent this.

