by Mantisdreamz wrote:
This term, meme - really IS vague. If it is a process by which trends are created & spread - can't we just chalk that up to people wanting to relate to and fit in with one another?
So, one person finds an idea that might fascinate others... others are fascinated by it, and the idea spreads through people like wild fire... because, it helps ourselves link to others by knowing that this certain idea really IS fascinating, and having others agree on that.
Well yes, but memes are supposed to expand on the mechanism behind that. As a direct comparison, speaking of ideas spreading because people like to fit in and relate to others, is like saying evolutionary traits spread because others in the species find them attractive or appealing. On one level, yes this is true, but evolutionary theory/memes want to explain the phenomenon on a deeper level - that is, exactly how are ideas formed inside a person and what causes it to change and what causes it to "outcompete" other ideas, in the same way we try to understand how genes compete.
Mantisdreamz wrote:The term meme seems to portray the idea of some sort of psychological virus that spreads amongst people. It seems to insinuate that people can 'catch' this virus of the meme, and carry it on.
Yes, the "virus" analogy is particularly annoying as it makes it seem like a passive process..
Mantisdreamz wrote:But meanwhile, it is just the instinctual behaviour of people to try to relate to one another - which there is no name for - it's just a reality of human behaviour.
Don't know if I am making myself clear.
Nats, would do you mean exactly when you say they are supposed to mutate? You mean - like, the more one can enhance an idea that has already spread - the more likely that the enhanced idea will prevail?
Mutation, in the form of ideas and concepts, actually is a real thing and it occurs through transmission fidelity. Basically, if I say, "A man walks into a bar and says, "Ouch!"", you might talk to your friend tomorrow and say, "I heard the funniest joke! Right: A man is walking along and suddenly he walks into a bar and it hurts!". Now, you have conveyed the same information, but you've changed it as a result of your recall (or perhaps as a result of a storage error). Most likely your friend will stare at you blankly and tell you it's an awful joke and that "strain" of joke will quickly die out. However, you might misremember it in a way that improves the joke, perhaps you extend on some part of it to draw the listener in, maybe you perform the action of hitting the bar, etc. and as it improves the joke it gets passed on it's in new form. This is mutation (and then culling/selection).
As I noted earlier, the actual process behind the vague concept of memes is a real thing. Information is stored in our brains with a varying level of fidelity (mutation), and the form that this information takes is culled or strengthened according to selection processes, and then the information that "survives" is passed on. So we do actually operate according to processes comparable to natural selection (of which the meme is supposed to be an analogy of), it's just that the way the meme was formulated was so vague, and even incorrect in some of its assumptions, that it was pretty meaningless - not to mention that the concept had already been formulated and refined by the behavioral sciences decades prior to when Dawkins suggested it.
(That is, I suspect it's probably something more precise than the general idea of cultural evolution.)
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