Not Sure If Brilliant or Merely Pedestrian: Toward a Rhetoric of the Meme by Phill Alexander

Figure 3: Susan Blackmore's TED Talk:Memes and Temes (referenced below--offered for reader enjoyment)


The meme, at least as specific theoretical structures, found its origin in chapter 11 of ethnologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’s (1976) book The Selfish Gene. The chapter, entitled “Memes: the New Replicators,” placed the meme in contrast with the gene (and the replication processes undertaken by DNA). Dawkins (1976) wrote:

We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.  `Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable 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 `memory', or to the French word même.  It should be pronounced to rhyme with `cream'. 

Dawkins, though he could have no real sense of what the internet would do with the “meme” as it exists in 2014, was still quite prepared in 1976 to offer a series of examples:

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches… memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.  If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed 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 propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.

Dawkins, for all intents and purposes, predicted the concept of “viral” internet spread decades before there was easy enough access for people to spread viral videos and emails. He also set the foundation for considering how information flows and new knowledge is built socially.  A few careful steps have to be taken to move from what Dawkins wrote to a more digital rhetoric based understanding of the meme,as he was of course speaking from a time when the idea of creating a meme on an iPhone and deploying it to millions of people would have been science fiction, but the idea of “spreading brain to brain” is a powerful foundation. Other scholars, such as Susan Blackmore (2008), tied the meme back to Charles Darwin, asserting that an understanding of memetics linked intrinsically to Darwin’s natural selection and the concept of “social Darwinism.” Blackmore’s definition of the meme, however, leaned away from the biological undertones of Dawkins. Blackmore stated:

A meme is not equivalent to an idea. It's not an idea, it's not equivalent to anything else, really. Stick with the definition. It's that which is imitated. Or information which is copied from person to person. (my emphasis)

While still asserting a place for memetics as a science, Blackmore instantly brought in the mundane, offering as an example the fact that toilet paper as an idea has been replicated across societies, as travelers witnessed it and chose to replicate it upon returning home. Her moves to ensure a concrete understanding of the meme as ubiquitous mark the direction the meme was going and is still heading. In her book The Meme Machine, Blackmore (2000) built a definition of the meme that actually asserts that instead of the meme being “like” a gene, genes are in fact “like” memes, as memes are the “universal replicators” which fulfill the following criteria: high fidelity replication, multiple replications, and longevity of existence.

Blackmore (2008) also made a step that most other scholars have not: she attempted to specify a different kind of meme brought about by technology (specifically digital technology). She names this the “teme,” describing them as techomemes and attempting to differentiate how technology changes the ability to copy and replicate. This idea is certainly interesting, but it is difficult to not read it as inconsistent when Blackmore herself asserted the dominance of the meme over the gene. That she now wants to assert that technology provides “a third replicator” that wouldn’t be strictly memetic seems at odds with her original premise. At the same time, it is difficult to criticize what is only part of a twenty-minute lecture, and the idea certainly has merit in the greater scientific argument about memetics.  That the “teme” hasn’t taken off, however, tends to support a reading that finds it difficult to read the teme as different from Blackmore’s superior positioned meme. The full TED Talk appears above as Figure 3.

Francis Heylighen (2004), a philosophy scholar and member of the Principia Cybernetica project (an interdisciplinary group looking at technology and human cognition), expanded on the basic definition of the meme by laying out for it a four stage process of replication, consisting of “assimilation,” “retention,” “expression,” and “transmission.” He also asserted four types of criteria for consideration of memes:

  • “objective: selection by phenomena or objects independent of the hosts and memes involved in the process ,”
  • “subjective: selection by the subject who assimilates the meme ,”
  • “intersubjective: selection through the interactions between different subjects,” and
  •  “meme-centered: selection on the level of the meme itself.”

There was, as well, a now defunct Journal of Memetics. Many of the articles there rehash and restate the same material I have mentioned thus far, creating a rich, but not surprisingly memetic, discussion. They start by tracing the meme through Dawkins to Darwin, then make moves to step at least a bit—some more than others—away from the biological terminology and to apply the meme to other fields of study. A quick search of journal articles shows that the meme’s greatest propagationis  as a term in study is in physics and math, as many studies have been done relating to memetic equations. Less, thus far, has been done in the social sciences and humanities.