Meme

The meme (neuter; plural: meme, from ancient Greek μίμημα mīmēma, "imitated things", to ancient Greek μιμεῖσθαι mimeisthai, "to imitate") is the subject of meme theory and denotes a single content of consciousness, for example a thought. It can be passed on through communication and internalized via the process of imitation, thus being multiplied and thus perpetuated socioculturally in much the same way that genes are heritable biologically. Quite correspondingly, memes are thus subject to sociocultural evolution, which can largely be described with the same theories. Analogously, changes are possible during transmission - for example, through misunderstanding or different perceptions - whereby (external) environmental influences can reinforce or suppress further dissemination. According to the scientist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, a meme is created "when the human nervous system reacts to an experience".

In various disciplines (especially psychology, social sciences, cultural studies), the meme theory, insofar as it has received attention, has been subjected to some harsh criticism. On the one hand, the terms (replicator, unit of selection, etc.) are defined too vaguely to be able to be empirically confirmed or refuted at all; on the other hand, the meme theory simply ignores the results of psychological and social science research. The controversial nature of the meme theory is further aggravated by the fact that the theory's knowledge gain is unclear.

Since the turn of the millennium, the term has also been used - often in its English spelling meme - for Internet phenomena that spread "virally" in social media.

Etymology and terminology

The word meme is a made-up word. It is etymologically based on the English word gene and has several other references:

• to the Greek μιμεῖσθαι mimeisthai (to imitate) and μῖμος mimos (mime, actor).
• to the French même (same)
• to the Latin memor (remembering)
• to the English mime (mime) and memory (memory, memory)

The English term meme was introduced in 1976 by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins; he gave as examples for it: "ideas, beliefs, patterns of behaviour". With this cultural counterpart to the biological gene, he illustrated the principle of natural selection, whose basic unit is replicators of information. He described the term meme as a self-chosen artificial word that refers to the Greek term μίμημα, mimema ("something imitated").

Memetics is the term used to describe the principle of information transmission derived from it. The meme is reflected in the meme template (in the brain or another storage medium) and the meme execution (for example, communication: a score (memotype) is used to make music reproducible. The music actually sounding in the concert hall is correspondingly the so-called phenotype). For the terms meme template and meme execution, the terms memotype and phaemotype are often used in analogy to the pair of terms genotype and phenotype from genetics. The networking of mutually dependent memes was first described by Dawkins as a "coadapted meme complex", which was later combined into the artificial term memplex.

History of Theory

According to Dawkins' own statement, he fell back on the theses of the US-American anthropologist F. Ted Cloak Jr. (* 1931), expressed in 1975, about the existence of corpuscles of culture, of cultural corpuscles on the neuronal level, as the basis of cultural evolution. Dawkins does not distinguish whether a piece of information is located on a DNA segment, stored as a thought in the brain, printed as a sentence in a book or travels from person to person as a spoken word. Information reproduces, according to Dawkins, whether as a gene through cell division and the accompanying replication of the DNA strand, or by means of communication in the case of the meme. In this context, the transmission of the meme by communication is not to be understood as a copy ("blueprint") of a thought from brain to brain, but - by capturing the essential core of the message and passing it on - rather like a "baking recipe" for reproducing the same thought. Descriptive models of thought-measures are thus subject to very similar laws as those of evolution in biology. Dawkins speaks in this context of "universal Darwinism".

Memes as replicators of cultural evolution show a limited analogy to other replicators. Besides genes, Dawkins also mentions viruses, computer viruses or prions. In the analogy, processes of cultural replication - as in evolutionary theory - are also explained by variation and selection. Accordingly, imperfect replication leads to different reproductive success of different replicators. As with other replicators, collective autocatalytic associations of memes are formed.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett supported the concept of memetics in his work Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. The cultural anthology formulated by Otto Koenig in 1970 can be described as an independent but intellectually related theory. It, too, deals with the evolution of culture, but does not use the construct of the meme for this purpose, but works purely descriptively.

From 1997 to 2005 there was a regularly published Journal of Memetics. Since 2009, there is the trimonthly journal Memetic Computing.