
The Meme as Meme (2013) - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/5/fame/the-meme-as-meme
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amelius
> But trawling the Internet, I found a strange paradox: While memes were
> everywhere, serious meme theory was almost nowhere.

The same can be said for jokes. Jokes are everywhere. But where are the
theories behind them?

~~~
pizzazzaro
Folklore (including Jokes) is itself a branch of Anthropology.

Dawkins' work examining Memes as "simplest unit of an idea" within an
"evolutionary context" initially seems like a throwback to the early 20th
century practice of _lets apply Darwin 's natural selection to everything!_
And this was largely how social scientists interpreted it.

However, as a model within the study of Folklore, it is fun to trace what
jokes and stories move between which communities, and how they mutate along
the way. A minimal understanding of Social psychology adds a new depth to such
"joke maps", and how they affect the popular mindset. Studies actually
correlating large swaths of these to history are sorely missing.

Its too bad we dont really have Folklorists mapping memes across topic/region
specific communities such as groups of subreddits or facebook groups/pages -
this would be a goldmine to potentially redeem or actually refute Dawkins'
ideas in a more concrete manner.

But this makes for several problems: reverse engineering the "joke" would make
for one hell of a propaganda tool.

