It still makes me a bit sad that the concept of "meme" managed to shift from being an informational analogue of genes to a viral image with goofy text. I'm not sure how that happened, but at this point the ship has sailed.
Watching a decade ago her TED talk (<a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_memes_and_temes" rel="nofollow">https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_memes_and_temes</a>) was something like a shock for me, as I was unaware of the concept back then.<p>Even if you don't agree with her conclusions, watching things a different point of view can give you new insights.
I first discovered Susan Blackmore's work last March from this here at HN: NASA's free history e-book collection (nasa.gov)[1]<p>Scanning this awesome collection of publications I found, Susan Blackmore. “Dangerous Memes; or, What the Pandorans Let Loose” (Cosmos & Culture [2] p297)<p>The ideas discussed in the essay could not have found me at a better time--2020's COVID disinformation, Fake News, Q and on and on.<p>I'm not an anthropologist, nor in any way invested in anthropological orthodoxy. I simply find the idea of memetics useful for identifying and describing behaviors and cultural products in new ways. I frequently listen to NPR programs such as WNYC New York's On The Media[3], who make an effort to explicate news media. And yet I feel the explanations are repetitive, contingent and continue to fall short. Memetics simply acts as another perspective in the vein of what Scott E Page calls "Many Model Thinking[4]--a second opinion to a George Lakoff[5] or other perspectives of the _new normal_ in media[6]--just to offer a few examples.<p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22718489" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22718489</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/hist_culture_cosmos_detail.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/hist_culture_cosmos_deta...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm" rel="nofollow">https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm</a><p>[4]: <a href="https://hbr.org/2018/11/why-many-model-thinkers-make-better-decisions" rel="nofollow">https://hbr.org/2018/11/why-many-model-thinkers-make-better-...</a><p>[5]: <a href="https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/keep-substance-truth" rel="nofollow">https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/keep-subst...</a><p>[6]: <a href="https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-2016-12-02" rel="nofollow">https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-med...</a>
> The memes took a great step forward when they invented writing – and then printing, and then other forms of communication, from railways and ships to fax machines. The important concepts of copy-the-product versus copy-the-instruction are explained. <i>We can now understand how and why the internet has evolved and guess at the direction the memes will push it in.</i><p>From the synopsis. Oh boy was that prescient.<p>I'm also glad we don't have to wait for our memes to arrive by railway, as was seemingly done in the past.
This introduction crystalized a lot of the subject/debates around that time to me: <a href="https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/13108434.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/13108434.pdf</a>