Memes

Filled with all this new feline knowledge, I felt that I should continue on my quest to teach this old dog some new tricks.

I noted on J's blog, that there is a new meme that was going around. A few questions later, I kind of got the gist of this latest craze, but that surface knowledge just wasn't enough for me on this glorious day. Ok, so the sun came out and it is perking me up.

So what the hell is a meme, to us other lay peoples?

A meme can be seen as an idea that we, as humans, communicate. Memes are a kind of thing, but they only live inside of our minds. Like all things, memes fit better with some things than others. Some memes naturally fit better in people’s minds. Some memes naturally fit better with other memes. When a group of memes fit well together and pull the strings of someone’s mouth and vocal cords so that they pass them on to others, a new, self-replicating thing gets created. The new thing is called a memeplex.

Accordingly, a meme can also be viewed as simply a unit of intellectual or cultural information that survives long enough to be recognized as such, and which can pass from mind to mind. There's not much of a sense of describing thought processes, but nor is it just a model. A meme survives in the world because people pass it on to other people, either vertically to the next generation, or horizontally to our fellows.

Memes are contagious ideas, all competing for a share of our mind in a kind of Darwinian selection. According to Richard Brodie, memes can evolve, they become better and better at distracting and diverting us from whatever we'd really like to be doing with our lives. On this website, there is an interesting piece on chain mails, etc. and how they can be "mind viruses".

The OED defines the meme as "a cultural element or behavioural trait whose transmission and consequent persistence in a population, although occurring by non-genetic means (esp. imitation), is considered as analogous to the inheritance of a gene. Examples are tunes, clothes, ideas, catch phrases..."

Interesting stuff. Not sure what to make of it, but interesting just the same. Now you and me know.