Your Mind: A Vehicle For Memes
Concepts bathe dark zones in light. — Colin Cremin, Exploring Videogames with Deleuze and Guattari.
For those who follow me, you probably know that in a previous article I have already talked about memes and what they might be. So some of you might be thinking, haven’t you already given us your view about it? Well, to a certain extent, certainly, but in that previous article, I used the term meme in the way in which most of us, inhabitants of pop culture, use it. That is, memes are those funny images with some text that we regularly find on social media. But is that the only possible meaning for memes?
Genes and Memes
In fact, the term was coined by Richard Dawkins in his famous book The Selfish Gene — which I still need to read. And, according to the relevant literature, Dawkins exposed there that the fruitful explanatory schemas that evolutionary theories have to offer can also be used for other fields other than biology. Wait, what?!
Yes, in fact, Dawkins explains that in the same way that in the realm of biology we have replicators of information which are called genes, within the realm of culture there would also be such replicators and these latter are what he calls memes.
As Kate Distin wonderfully exposes in The Selfish Meme — which I highly recommend due to both the quality and clarity of its content— memes operate in a similar fashion to genes. That is, like genes, memes go through what we would call a tripartite process. They go through replication, variation, and selection.
But, how does this exactly happen?
Natural Selection of Memes
Since memes are units of cultural information, then ideas, values, beliefs, skills, and so on, should be considered memes. So, as you might imagine, memes replicate through the minds of people. Within this process of replication, memes suffer variations, and, based on the way in which these variations interact with the cultural environment wherein the minds inhabit, some of these memes will be favoured and, therefore, persist, while other variations might be rendered as useless and, as a consequence, will be expelled.
So this would mean that the ideas and values that we hold are in fact the result of aggressive competition between memes. As Distin says, they compete to draw the attention of our minds. But do not fall into the trap of feeling special about this. Memes, like genes, do not pursue the best for the minds that carry them. They just want to replicate. For this reason, some authors consider them as viruses of the mind.
So now you know a little bit more about memes, my friends. In the next article, we will discuss memetics! Meme…what? Memetics! The science of memes!
