Session 0 · Memetics begins at home.
Before Internet memes, before ideology, before theory: gestures, tunes, habits, rituals, phrases, drawings, interfaces and everyday acts of copying.
“A meme is whatever is copied from person to person.”
— Susan Blackmore, working definition
For today, let us start with this deliberately simple definition.
Copying does not necessarily mean making an exact duplicate.
You hear a joke.
You remember the structure, forget several words, change a character...
...and tell it to somebody else.
Something survived the transformation.
external expression → perception → internal reconstruction → expression
A meme can appear outside us: as sound, gesture, image, text, object, ritual.
It can be reconstructed inside us: as memory, rule, association, expectation, intention.
Then it can become external again.
What exactly is being copied?
Memetics is a theory among other theories.
Human culture can also be studied through psychology, anthropology, sociology, cultural evolution, semiotics, media theory, neuroscience and many other perspectives.
Memetics highlights replication, variation and selection.
It does not explain the whole human being.
And although it may begin to look as if everything is a meme...
...it is not.
A virus spreads. That does not make it a cultural meme.
Genes are copied. That does not make them memes.
You discover by yourself that fire is hot. No person-to-person copying was necessary.
A yawn may trigger another yawn through an evolved response rather than culturally learned imitation.
Spread alone is not enough.
Is the meme the sentence?
The idea expressed by the sentence?
The memory in somebody's brain?
The rule that allows the sentence to be reconstructed?
The pattern distributed across people, media and artifacts?
Different memetic theories answer differently.
Memethical engineering is the deliberate design, modification, and circulation of memes and memetic environments in accordance with explicit ethical goals.
For example: counteracting propaganda and manipulation.
Increasing epistemic and cultural diversity.
Supporting critical reflection.
Increasing resilience against harmful or monopolizing meme complexes.
Memetic engineering asks: How can this spread?
Memethical engineering must additionally ask: Should it spread?
Who benefits?
What disappears when it succeeds?
Can people recognize the mechanism?
Can alternatives survive?
Success ≠ virality.
Let us now temporarily leave theory behind.
Look at ordinary life as a landscape of things passing from person to person.
We will move from the smallest and fastest patterns...
...toward increasingly complex cultural structures.
Memes rarely live alone.
They support, trigger and protect one another.
A fashion includes clothes, vocabulary, gestures, music, places and identities.
A profession includes practices, jargon, values, rituals and status symbols.
Religions, ideologies, artistic movements and institutions can contain enormous interconnected systems of culturally transmitted elements.
Such complexes are often called memeplexes.
Think of one meme you encountered today.
Not necessarily an Internet meme.
Where did you encounter it?
What was its external form?
What did you reconstruct internally?
Did you reproduce it?
Did you modify it?
Why might this particular pattern survive?
A handshake.
A birthday song.
A stupid little drawing in a school notebook.
A phrase you suddenly notice yourself saying.
A floppy disk that survived its floppy disk.
A belief nobody remembers learning.
Culture replicates through us—but never without being reconstructed by us.