On memes and bloody useless software...

[matgb]

There's nothing wrong witht he code that caused the last post to mess up completely, at least not that I can see. Ah well, deleted the offending meme.

Meh, on the subject, the show-off intellectual in me wants to know, without looking it up, how many people actually know
a) what a meme actually is
and
b) who created the term.

PaulJ and I used to talk about the theory incessently while we lived in Exeter, now everyone's using the word and I'm curious. Did oyu know the theory before you started using it in LJ, do you know it now, is meme just another cool word you ue without knowledge?

None of this matters, of course, but, y'know...

Comments

[harlotqueen.livejournal.com]

you'd left a " out of the cut text :)

[matgb]

Not that I could see, I checked every begining and end. Meh, not that I care. Answer the questions damnit ;-)

[harlotqueen.livejournal.com]

I pronouce it Me-Me which sounds like the cry for attention most of them are :)

[shadow-exe.livejournal.com]

That, sir, is because you are un-lettered.

[iamseph.livejournal.com]

I avoid using it purposefully since I don't know what it's supposed to mean.

[shadow-exe.livejournal.com]

The word meme derives from memetics, which is the pseudo-science of treating sociological phenomena and quantised "chunks" of culture like evolving genetic material within a population of host organisms. A meme is a "mental gene" - a quantum of thought - and like a gene, it's a nebulous, hazy concept to be adjusted as necessary to make it useful. Sociologists as a whole, are dismissive of the concept - arguing that genes are rigid, mechanistic things that can't be used as analogies for the flowing, individualistic streams of thought and belief that make up a culture: proving more that they don't understand genetics than that they understand culture.
I suspect that the unwillingness of the social science communities to use, or even contemplate, scientific analogies to dynamic systems is a symptom of the same underlying statistical sloppiness that makes people think that sans-serif fonts are more readable, and that it's "scientifically proven" to be so...

As for the coining of the word, I first encountered it used by Terry Pratchett, to describe a then-fictional future science in Strata - however, Pratchett is astoundingly well-read in popular science, so I expect he lifted it from a more scholarly source.

[matgb]

Well, that you know the answer doesn't surprise me. Richard Dawkins (a biologist or geneticist by trade iirc) coined the exact term, google dawkins + meme and you get a decent selection of sources.

Had forgotten it was "mental gene" though.

Oh, Huggy? It's pronounced meeem (well, that's how Dawkins says it, it's his word, so I think he wins on points).

Think I'll re read Strat at some point; ight need to buy a copy though, IIRC the one I read was borrowed...

[shadow-exe.livejournal.com]

Dawkins is a molecular biologist / pioneering geneticist

[johnwordsworth.livejournal.com]

It was a post very similar to this one that told me where the term Meme had come from originally - from your same good self infact!

And in answer to your question Mat, I had no idea of the term before I started using LJ in Summer, but it didn't take me long to ask when I realised there was a word being used that I didn't know where it came from...

[matgb]

Adds another reason to like John to list;
it didn't take me long to ask when I realised there was [something] that I didn't know

It's one of those things that gets to me, people who do stuff they don't understand and make no effort to do so either.

I can respect the "don't know, won't use it" attitude, but prefer the "interesting..." attitude.

You coming to any of the GameSoc stuff tomorrow?

[johnwordsworth.livejournal.com]

Definately! I'm going to be running a BESM game which I think is suitably weird :). However, I doubt I'll be there until 1pm/2pm-ish because, well, I don't think I'll make it there before!

It's not that I won't be out of bed by 10am, just that I'd rather get up slowly and not have to rush anywhere!

I'm currently tackling that "interesting" attitude and desperately trying to decide if I want to go ahead and do a PhD (of the paid variety)...