 Meme |
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The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. "Mimeme" comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosylable that sounds a bit like "gene." I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to "meme." If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to "memor," or to the French word "même" (which means "same"). It should be pronounced to rhyme with "cream." Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as gene types propogate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via process, which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears or reads about a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propogate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: "Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propogation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell." -Chapter 11, "Memes the New Replicators", from The Selfish Gene, 1990, Oxford Press |
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When N.K. Humphrey compared a meme to a virus, he displayed a scientific detachment from judgement as to whether the infectious meme was beneficial, neutral, or harmful. Even his use of the term "parasitize" was meant to classify the term meme taxonomically, as if ideas evolved the way organisms do. He chose the metaphor of a virus instead of a bacterium, or a multicelled parasite like a fluke, because a virus doesn't actually live and reproduce like an organism, it's actually just a shred of DNA or RNA, a bit of genetic information that's encapsulated in a coat of protein. Viruses hijack the cell's own reproduction, and makes the cell betray not only the host body, but it's very identity as a cell, so that its previous function is compromised or even obliterated, the infected cell just becomes a virus factory. Compare this metaphor to the way a religion or political system compels a person to devote their lives to proselyetization or even violence. There are memes that are deadly, like the ones that cause people to become suicidal terrorists, as well as memes that are benign, like orange being an "in" color for 2003. |
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| Reliquary ©Scott Bodenheimer, September 12, 1997, revised November 26, 2003,d | ||||
