Memes in Alltag

“A meme is whatever is copied from person to person.”— Susan Blackmore, working definitionFor 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 els...

external expression → perception → internal reconstruction → expressionA meme can appear outside us: as sound, gesture, image, text, object, ritual.It can be reconstructed insid...

Memetics is a theory among other theories.Human culture can also be studied through psychology, anthropology, sociology, cultural evolution, semiotics, media theory, neuroscienc...

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...

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 p...

Memethical engineering is the deliberate design, modification, and circulation of memes and memetic environments in accordance with explicit ethical goals.For example: counterac...

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 t...

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.........

Memes rarely live alone.They support, trigger and protect one another.A fashion includes clothes, vocabulary, gestures, music, places and identities.A profession includes practi...

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 reprod...

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...