A meme "English respelling pronunciation"> MEEM ) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person in a culture - often with the aim of conveying a particular phenomenon, theme, or meaning represented by the meme. A meme acts as a unit to bring up cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other phenomena imitated with imitated themes. Proponents of the concept consider memes as cultural analogs to genes in which they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.
Proponents theorize that memes are a viral phenomenon that may be evolved by natural selection in a way analogous to biological evolution. Memes does this through the process of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance, each of which affects the reproductive success of memes. Memes spread through the behavior they generate in their host. Memes that propagate less fertile can be extinct, while others can survive, spread, and (for better or worse) to mutate. The most effective replicating memes enjoy more success, and some replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the well-being of their host.
A field of studies called memetics emerged in the 1990s to explore the concept and transmission of memes in terms of evolutionary models. Critics of various fronts have challenged the idea that academic studies can examine memes empirically. However, developments in neuroimaging can make empirical studies possible. Some commentators in the social sciences question the idea that one can categorize cultures in the sense of separate units, and very critical of the biological nature of the theoretical foundations. Others argue that the use of this term is the result of a misunderstanding of the original proposal.
The word meme is a neologism created by Richard Dawkins. This is from Dawkins's 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins's own position is somewhat ambiguous: he welcomes N. K. Humphrey's suggestion that "memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically" and proposes to memes as "physical in the brain." Later, he argued that his initial intentions, perhaps before his approval of Humphrey's opinion, were simpler.
Video Meme
Etimologi
The word meme is shortened (modeled on genes ) of mimeme (from Ancient Greek ?????? pronounced [mÃÆ': m ?: ma] m? m? ma , "imitated things", from the Greek ????????? mimeisthai , "to imitate", from mimos , "mime") was created by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a concept for discussion of the principles of evolution in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. Examples of memes provided in this book include melodies, slogans, modes, and building arch technologies. Kenneth Pike coined the phrases and ethics, generalizing the linguistic idea of ​​phonemes, morphemes, graphemes, lexemes, and tagmeme (as defined by Leonard Bloomfield), characterizing them as insiders' views and outward views of behavior and extending the concept into the tagmemic theory of human behavior culminating in Language in Relation to Integrated Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior , 1954). Maps Meme
Origins
The word meme comes from 1976 Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene . Dawkins cites as inspiring genetic works L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, anthropologist F. T. Cloak and ethologist J. M. Cullen. Dawkins writes that evolution does not depend on a particular chemical base of genetics, but only on the existence of self-replicating transmission units - in the case of biological evolution, genes. For Dawkins, the meme exemplifies another self-replicating unit with significant potential in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution. Although Dawkins coined the term 'meme' and developed the meme theory, it is likely that ideas are subject to the same evolutionary pressures as the biological properties discussed in Darwin's time. T. H. Huxley claims that 'The struggle for existence holds as much intellectual as possible in the physical world. A theory is a species of thought, and its right to life is coexist with its power to fight extinction by its competitors. '
Dawkins uses the term to refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider as a replicator. He hypothesizes that one can see many cultural entities as replicators, and points to the melodies, modes and skills learned for example. Memes generally replicate through human exposure, which has evolved as an efficient information and behavioral engine. Because humans do not always copy memes perfectly, and because they can refine, merge or modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time. Dawkins likened the process in which memes survive and change through cultural evolution to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution.
Dawkins defines memes as cultural transmission units, or imitation units and replication, but later definitions will vary. The lack of a consistent, thorough, and precise understanding of what typically forms a unit of cultural transmission remains a problem in the memetics debate. In contrast, the concept of genetics gained tangible evidence with the discovery of the biological function of DNA. Meme Transmission requires a physical medium, such as photons, sound waves, touch, taste, or smell because memes can be transmitted only through the senses.
Dawkins notes that in societies with a culture one need not have offspring to remain influential in the actions of individuals thousands of years after their death:
But if you contribute to world culture, if you have a good idea... it can live, whole, long after your genes dissolve into a common pool. Socrates may or may not have one or two genes alive in the world today, such as G.C. Williams commented, but who cares? The meme complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi still remain strong.
Although Dawkins invented the term "meme", he has not claimed that the idea was entirely novel, and there were other expressions for similar ideas in the past. In 1904, Richard Semon published the Die Mneme (which appeared in English in 1924 as The Mneme ). The term mneme is also used in Maurice Maeterlinck The Life of the White Ant (1926), with some parallels to the Dawkins concept.
Life cycle picking: transmission, retention
Memes, analogously to genes, vary in their ability to replicate; successful memes are fixed and spreading, while those that are not worth stopping and forgetting. So a meme that proves to be more effective in replicating and surviving is chosen in the meme pool.
Memes first need retention. The longer the meme survives in its host, the higher its chances of propagation. When the host uses the meme, the meme's life is extended. The reuse of the nerve space that holds a copy of a certain meme to accommodate different memes is the greatest threat to the meme's copy.
A meme that increases the host's longevity will usually last longer. Conversely, shorter memes of host life will tend to disappear faster. However, as a perishable host, retention is not sufficient to perpetuate memes in the long run; memes also require transmission.
Life forms can transmit information vertically (from parent to child, through gene replication) and horizontally (via virus and other means). Memes can be replicated vertically or horizontally in one biological generation. They may also fall asleep for long periods of time.
Memes reproduce by copying from the nervous system to another, either through communication or imitation. Imitation often involves copying the observed behavior of other individuals. Communication can be direct or indirect, where memes radiate from one person to another through copies recorded in an inanimate source, such as a book or music score. Adam McNamara suggests that memes can be classified as internal or external memes (meme-i or e-memes).
Some commentators have likened meme transmission to spread of transmission. Social controversies such as fashion, hysteria, imitative evil, and copycat suicide exemplify memes that are seen as imitations of infectious ideas. Observers differentiate the infectious meme imitations of an infectious instinctive phenomenon such as yawning and laughing, which they perceive as innate (not socially) behavior.
Aaron Lynch describes seven general patterns of meme transmission, or "mind-transmission":
- Number of parent : an idea that affects the number of children they have. Children respond receptively to the ideas of their parents, and thus ideas that directly or indirectly encourage higher birth rates will replicate themselves to a higher level than those that inhibit higher births.
- Efficiency to be a parent : an idea that increases the proportion of children who will adopt their parents' ideas. Cultural separatism exemplifies a practice in which one can expect a higher level of meme-replication - because memes for separation create barriers from exposure to competing ideas.
- Proselytic : the idea is generally passed on to others outside of the children themselves. Ideas that drive the proselytize of memes, as seen in many religious or political movements, can replicate memes horizontally through a particular generation, spreading faster than parent-to-child transmissions.
- Preservational : an idea that affects those who hold them to continue holding it for a long time. Ideas that encourage longevity in their host, or leave their host in particular refusing to abandon or replace these ideas, improve the preservation of memes and provide protection from competition or other meme proselytism.
- Adversative : ideas that affect those who hold them to attack or sabotage competing ideas and/or those who hold them. Adversative replication can provide an advantage in meme transmission when the memes themselves encourage aggression against other memes.
- Cognitive : ideas that are assumed to be convincing by the majority of the population that encounters them. Memes transmitted cognitively depend heavily on a group of ideas and other cognitive traits that are already widely held in the population, and thus usually spread more passively than other forms of meme transmission. Memes that are scattered in cognitive transmission are not counted as self-replicating.
- Motivation : ideas people adopt because they see some personal interest in adopting them. In fact, the motivational emissive memes do not propagate, but this mode of transmission often occurs in relation to self-replicating memes in the efficiency mode of parents, proselytic and preservation.
Memes as discrete units
Dawkins originally defined meme as a noun that "conveyed the idea of ​​a cultural transmission unit, or an artificial unit ". John S. Wilkins defends the idea of ​​meme as the essence of cultural imitation while emphasizing the evolutionary aspect of memes, defining memes as "the least sociocultural information unit associated with selection processes that have favorable or unfavorable selection biases that exceed their endogenous tendencies." To replace ". The meme as a unit provides a convenient way of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless of whether it contains someone else in it, or is part of a larger meme. A meme can consist of one word, or meme can consist of the entire speech in which the word first appeared. This forms an analogy with the idea of ​​genes as a unit of self-replicating information found on self-replicating chromosomes.
While the identification of memes as "units" conveys their nature to replicate as separate entities and can not be separated, it does not imply that the mind has somehow become quantized or that the idea of ​​"atoms" exists that can not be dissected into smaller pieces. A meme does not have a certain size. Susan Blackmore writes that the melodies of the Beethoven symphony are usually used to describe the difficulties involved in limiting memes as discrete units. He notes that while the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony form a meme that is widely replicated as an independent unit, one can assume the whole symphony as a single meme as well.
The inability to embed ideas or cultural features into quantifiable key units is widely recognized as a problem for memetics. However, it has been argued that memetics processing traces can be quantified using neuroimaging techniques that measure changes in connectivity profiles between regions of the brain. "Blackmore meets the criticism by stating that memes are compared to genes in this case: that while genes do not have a certain size, nor can we perceive any phenotypic features directly to a particular gene, it has value because it encapsulates the key unit of inherited expression that is subject to on evolutionary pressure.In order to illustrate, he notes the evolution of selecting genes for features such as eye color, it does not opt ​​for individual nucleotides in DNA strands. Rotating plays a comparable role in understanding the evolution of imitated behavior.
Charles J. Lumsden and EO Wilson proposed the theory that genes and cultures evolved, and that the basic biological units of culture must conform to neural networks that serve as memory nodes semantics. They create their own words, "culturgen", which is incomprehensible. Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the cultural heritage base unit in his 1998 Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which outlines the fundamental role of memes in uniting the natural and social sciences.
Evolutionary effect on meme
Dawkins notes three conditions that must exist for evolution to occur:
- variations, or the introduction of new changes to existing elements;
- heredity or replication, or the capacity to make copies of the elements;
- differential "fitness", or the opportunity for one element to be more or less appropriate to the environment than the other.
Dawkins emphasizes that the process of evolution naturally occurs whenever these conditions coexist, and that evolution applies not only to organic elements such as genes. He considers the meme as also possessing the qualities necessary for evolution, and thus sees the evolutionary meme not only analogous to genetic evolution, but as a real phenomenon that is subject to the law of natural selection. Dawkins notes that when ideas move from one generation to the next, they can increase or decrease the survival of those who acquire those ideas, or influence the viability of the idea itself. For example, certain cultures can develop unique designs and tool-making methods that provide a competitive advantage over other cultures. Each tool design acts somewhat similar to a biological gene in which some populations have it and others do not, and meme functions directly affect the design presence in future generations. In accordance with the thesis that in evolution one can regard organisms as merely "inhabitants" suitable for reproducing genes, Dawkins argues that one can see people as "inhabitants" to replicate memes. As a result, successful memes may or may not need to provide any benefits to the host.
Unlike genetic evolution, memetic evolution can show Darwinian and Lamarckian properties. The Cultural Meme will have the characteristics of the Lamarckian heritage when the host aspires to imitate memes that are given through inference rather than by exactly copying them. Take the example of simple skill transmission cases such as hammer nails, skills imitated by a learner from watching a demonstration without having to imitate every discrete motion modeled by the teacher in a demonstration, stroke for a stroke. Susan Blackmore distinguishes the distinction between two modes of inheritance in meme evolution, characterizing Darwin's mode as "copying instruction" and Lamarckian as "copying the product."
Meme groups, or memeplexes (also known as complex memes, or as memecomplexes), such as doctrines and cultural or political systems, can also play an inside part new meme reception. Memflex consists of meme groups that replicate together and coordinate. Memes corresponding to successful memeplex can gain acceptance by "piggybacking" on the success of memeplex. For example, John D. Gottsch discusses the transmission, mutation and selection of the religious memeplex and the theistic meme contained. The theistic memes discussed included "the prohibition of deviant sexual practices such as incest, adultery, homosexuality, animalistic, castration, and religious prostitution", which may have increased vertical transmission memeplex religious parents. Similar memes are thus included in most religious memeplexes, and harden over time; they become "inviolable canons" or a series of dogmas, eventually finding their way into secular law. This can also be referred to as taboo propagation.
Memetics
The memetics discipline, dating from the mid-1980s, provides an approach to the evolutionary model of the transfer of cultural information based on the concept of memes. Poetic experts have proposed that as memes function analogously to genes, memetics functions analogously analogous to genetics. Memetika tries to apply conventional scientific methods (such as those used in population genetics and epidemiology) to explain the pattern and transmission of existing cultural ideas.
Critics of memetics include claims that memetics ignore the already established advances in other fields of cultural studies, such as sociology, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, and social psychology. The question remains whether the concept of meme is considered a valid and unprovable scientific theory. This view considers memetics as a theory in its infancy: protoscience for supporters, or pseudoscience for some critics.
Critics of meme theory
The objection to studying the evolution of a genetic meme (though not in the presence of a meme) involves the perceived gap in the genes/meme analogy: cumulative evolution of genes depends on biological selection-not too large or too small in relation to the rate of mutation. There seems to be no reason to think that the same balance will exist in the selection pressure on memes.
Luis Benitez-Bribiesca M.D., a memetic critic, calls this theory a "pseudoscientific dogma" and "a dangerous idea that poses a threat to the serious study of cultural awareness and evolution". As a factual critique, Benitez-Bribiesca shows the lack of a "code script" for memes (analogous to gene DNA), and the excessive instability of meme mutation mechanisms (ideas that move from one brain to another). ), which will lead to low replication accuracy and high mutation rates, resulting in an evolutionary process becoming chaotic.
The British political philosopher John Gray has characterized Dawkins's memetic theory of religion as "nonsense" and "not even the latest... theory in a series of poor Darwinian metaphors", comparable to Intelligent Design in its value as a science.
Other criticisms come from semiotic theorists such as Deacon and Kull. This view considers the concept of "meme" as a primitive "sign" concept. Thus meme is depicted in memetics as a sign that has no triadic nature. Semiotikians can think of memes as a "degenerate" sign, which only includes its ability to be copied. Thus, in the broadest sense, the copying objects are memes, while the object of translation and interpretation are signs.
Fracchia and Lewontin regard memetics as reductionist and inadequate. The evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr disagrees with Dawkins-based gene views and the use of the term "meme", affirming it as "unnecessary synonym" for "concept", the reason that the concept is not limited to individuals or generations, can persist for long periods of time, and can develop.
Apps
Different opinions about how best to apply the concept of memes in a "proper" discipline framework. One view sees the meme as providing a philosophical perspective useful for examining cultural evolution. Proponents of this view (such as Susan Blackmore and Daniel Dennett) argue that considering the cultural development of the meme view as if own memes responding to the pressure to maximize their own replication and survival may lead to useful insights and generating valuable predictions about how culture evolves over time. Others such as Bruce Edmonds and Robert Aunger have focused on the need to provide an empirical basis for memetics to become a useful and respected scientific discipline.
The third approach, described by Joseph Poulshock, as "radical memetics" seeks to place memes at the center of the theory of materialistic thought and personal identity.
Leading researchers in evolutionary psychology and anthropology, including Scott Atran, Dan Sperber, Pascal Boyer, John Tooby and others, argue the possibility of a mismatch between modularity of mind and memetics. In their view, the mind constructs certain aspects of the ideas produced, and these communicative aspects generally trigger or acquire ideas in other thoughts through inference (for the relatively rich structures generated from inputs with loyalty very low) and not a high replication or imitation of loyalty. Atran discusses communication that involves religious beliefs as an example. In a series of experiments, he asked the religious people to write on a piece of paper the meaning of the Ten Commandments. Despite the consensus expectations of the subject itself, the interpretation of the commands shows a wide range of variations, with little evidence of consensus. In other experiments, subjects with autism and subjects without autism interpret ideological and religious utterances (eg, "Let a thousand flowers bloom" or "For everything there is a season"). People with autism show a significant tendency to paraphrase and repeat the content of the original statement (eg: "Do not cut interest before bloom"). Control tends to infer broader cultural meanings with slightly replicated content (eg: "Follow the flow" or "Everyone should have equal opportunity"). Only subjects with autism - who lack the inferential capacity levels normally associated with aspects of the theory of mind - almost function as "meme machines".
In his book Robot Rebellion Stanovich uses memes and memeplex concepts to describe the cognitive renewal program he calls "rebellion". In particular, Stanovich argues that the use of memes as descriptors for cultural units is useful because it serves to emphasize the nature of transmission and acquisition that parallels the epidemiological studies. These properties make the parasitic nature of the memes sometimes acquired, and as a result the individual must be motivated to meme reflectively using what he calls the "bootstrap Neurathian" process.
Religion
Although social scientists such as Max Weber seek to understand and explain religion in terms of cultural attributes, Richard Dawkins calls for a re-analysis of religion in terms of the evolution of self-replicating ideas separated from producing the biological benefits they may give.
As an enthusiastic Darwinian, I am not satisfied with the explanations given by my fellow enthusiasts for human behavior. They have tried to find 'biological advantage' in the various attributes of human civilization. For example, tribal religion has been seen as a mechanism to strengthen group identity, which is valuable for species of packet hunters that individuals rely on cooperation to capture large and rapid prey. Often the preconceptions of evolution in terms of such theories are implicitly framed by the electorate, but it is possible to repeat theories in terms of orthodox gene selection.
He argues that the role of key replicators in cultural evolution does not belong to genes, but memes replicate thought from person to person through imitation. This replicator responds to selective pressures that may or may not affect biological reproduction or survival.
In his Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore regards religion as a very tough meme. Many of the features common to the most practiced religions provide an embedded advantage in the context of evolution, he writes. For example, religions that proclaim the value of faith over evidence from daily experience or the reason of injecting society against many of the most basic tools people use to evaluate their ideas. By associating altruism with religious affiliation, religious memes can multiply faster because people see that they can reap social and personal benefits. The age of religious memes increases with their documentation in respected religious texts.
Aaron Lynch attributes the robustness of religious memes in human culture to the fact that such memes combine several modes of meme transmission. The religious meme passes the generation from parent to child and passes through a generation through the exchange of memes of proselytism. Most people will hold the religion that their parents teach them all their lives. Many religions display elements of enmity, punish apostasy, for example, or condemn the unbelievers. In Thought of Transmission Lynch identifies transmission memes in Christianity as very powerful in scope. Believers see the conversion of unbelievers both as a religious duty and as an act of altruism. The promise of heaven for believers and the threat of hell for the unbelievers gives a strong boost for members to defend their beliefs. Lynch affirms that the belief in the Crucifixion of Jesus in Christianity strengthens each other's replication advantages through believers who owe their Savior to the sacrifice on the cross. The image of the crucifixion reappears in the sacraments of religion, and the proliferation of the cross symbols in homes and churches strongly reinforces various Christian memes.
Although religious memes have mushroomed in human culture, the modern scientific community is relatively resistant to religious beliefs. Robertson (2007) argues that if evolution accelerates under conditions of propagation difficulties, then we would expect to confront the variations of religious memes, set out in the general population, addressed to the scientific community. Using a memetic approach, Robertson deconstructed two attempts to grant the privilege of religious spirituality held in a scientific discourse. The advantage of a memetic approach compared to traditional "modernization" and "supply side" in understanding evolution and the spread of religion is explored.
Picking an explanation of racism
In the Software Culture: A Theory of Ideology , Jack Balkin argues that the memetics process can explain many of the most recognizable features of ideological thought. His theory of "software culture" suggests that memes form narratives, social networks, metaphorical and metamorphic models, and different mental structures. Balkin argues that the same structures used to generate ideas about free speech or free markets also serve to generate racist beliefs. For Balkin, whether memes are dangerous or maladaptive depends on the context of the environment in which they exist rather than in any source or special way for their origin. Balkin describes racist beliefs as "fantasy" memes that become dangerous or unjust "ideologies" when various people come together, such as through trade or competition.
Meme architecture
In A Theory of Architecture , Nikos Salingaros speaks of memes as "collections of information freely" that can be useful or harmful. He compared memes with true patterns and knowledge, characterizing memes as "highly simplified pattern versions" and as "unwarranted matching for some visual or mnemonic prototypes". Referring to Dawkins, Salingaros stresses that they can be transmitted because of their own communicative nature, that "the simpler they are, the faster they can multiply", and that the most successful memes "come with great psychological appeal".
Meme architecture, according to Salingaros, can have destructive power. "The images depicted in architectural magazines that represent buildings that can not possibly accommodate daily use remain in our memory, so we reproduce them unconsciously." He listed various architectural memes in circulation since the 1920s and which, in his view, has caused contemporary architecture to be quite separate from human needs. They have no connection and meaning, thus preventing "the creation of the correct connections necessary for our understanding of the world". He sees them no different from the antipattern in software design - as a wrong solution but still reused.
Internet culture
"Meme Internet" is a concept that spreads rapidly from person to person over the Internet, mostly through email, blogs, forums, Internet-based imageboard like 4chan, social networking sites like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, instant messaging, social news sites like Reddit, and video hosting services like YouTube and Twitch.
In 2013, Richard Dawkins marked the Internet meme as one deliberately altered by human creativity, distinguished from Dawkins' original idea involving mutations with random changes and a Darwinian selection.
Meme map
Source of the article : Wikipedia
0 Comments