Memes are a concept that keep popping up in discussions around contemporary media technologies and social relations. Within the field of media ecology, Matt Fuller devotes a large section of a chapter of his Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Technoculture book to memetics, contending that as a neo-darwinian cultural analogy the term may be a useful tool, though he does critique some aspects of the way the term is used. Elsewhere, such as in this article from Paul Mason on the BBC website, memes are identified as a key conceptual tool for understanding the wave of protests and mobilisations which have swept the globe over the past year.
Basically I disagree with both Fuller and Mason’s approach to the value of memes. Memetics is not a useful tool for analysing contemporary social practices and technological relations, nor is it key to grasping the way in which protesters have been fighting against the consequences of an economic crisis caused by the financial sector’s failure and the governmental decisions to bail out the banks and continue to let the bonuses flow while announcing austerity measures for everyone else. Memes are basically a failed analogy. In 1976, arch-reductionist Richard Dawkins penned the Selfish Gene, a book which sought to reduce complex social behaviours to genetic programming. Dawkins’s thesis was basically, that as the smallest unit of biological inheritance, genes were the basic building blocks of behavioural patterns. This of course is philosophy and not science, and a particular brand of reductionist philosophy which seeks to reduce all actions and events to the smallest quantifiable unit, just as atomism had done before we learned that atoms were not in fact the smallest units of matter. And just as we learned that you can’t tell everything about matter by looking at what atoms, subatomic particles or quarks it is composed of, we have come to learn that you can’t learn everything about a biological organism from studying its genome.
Since Dawkins’s wrote the selfish gene, neodarwinian evolutionary theory which posited that the processes of biological evolution were Mendelian inheritance and random mutation has been rocked by the discovery of several modes of evolutionary change which are neither. Horizontal gene transfer, endosymbiosis and co-evolutionary strategies (such as genes behaving in different ways according to environmental variables) all demonstrate that the neodarwinian position in the mid-70′s was only ever partially correct, as other evolutionary processes existed but were unknown back then. Indeed, many of these developments signal a move away from reductionism towards the kind of connective, contextual understandings evident in work in contemporary area of inquiry such as autopoiesis, complexity theory, and the ecology inspired perspective of another philosopher/scientist from the 1970′s, Gregory Bateson, who argued, ‘The unit of survival is not the breeding organism, or the family line or the society… The unit of survival is a flexible organism-in-its-environment.’ This kind of connective, ecologically informed, synthetic mode should be where media ecology generates its conceptual tools, not the reductionist (and it turns out erroneous) approach of neodarwinism.
Moving on to memes, Dawkins claims that these are the cultural analogue of genes. So while genes are the smallest unit of cultural inheritance, definite and quantifiable matter which exists in a complex sequence (the genome); memes must be the smallest quantifiable units of ideas. Except of course they aren’t. Even positing the smallest quantifiable unit of an idea seems ridiculous because ideas cannot be quantified according to scale. You cannot deconstruct ideas from a complex sequence to their basic units of being.
If memes are such a laughable concept, why then have they proved a popular one? My thinking around this is that alongside the ridiculous aspect of the analogy with genes, memes are used as a way of talking about the way that ideas evolve. The concept of cultural evolution has proved a controversial one with scientists (for example see Gould 1996 for a scathing critique), however if we approach culture and concepts as dynamic complex entities which resemble open physical systems in that they require a certain amount of intellectual energy to survive and propagate themselves, the comparison may seem somewhat more grounded. Gould criticises the notion of cultural evolution as reducing cultural change to neodarwinian principles, which would be bit as foolhardy as trying to ducing ideas to their basic building blocks.
What should be clear however in any discussion of cultural or technical evolution, is that the processes of cultural/technical evolution are not exact replicas of those found amongst living systems. Even within the category of living systems though, there are, as we have better grasped since Dawkins’s 1976 efforts, a range of evolutionary strategies which do not apply to all forms of life. Bacteria can swap genetic material (horizontal gene transfer) in ways which afford their particularly rapid mode of evolution, animals such as humans obviously do not display these properties. If I walk near you, we don’t swap genes and evolve. Just as there exist different evolutionary processes between different types of living system, you could quite reasonably expect there to be different evolutionary processes between living and non-living systems. Because cultural evolution depends on processes, such as the interventions of powerful commercial agents in their propagation, again the meme/gene analogy appears to be a poor and potentially obfuscatory one, whereas examining and analysing the various processes of cultural, technical or conceptual evolution, and exploring how, where, and under what conditions they occur seems a more productive approach which actually explores the complexity of non-living and non-organic forms of evolution.
Better understanding the processes of cultural evolution, the different dynamic factors which converge to form the attractors and phase space of concepts and technologies is a useful research aim for media ecology influenced research. Exploring what some of these processes are and how they work we can allow actors to better manage their interventions into the networks of mediated discourse, and reveal why certain ethically or factually dubious ideas, climate change denial, islamaphobia, extreme nationalisms etc are so well received. Appropriating poor analogies of dated, reductionist, scientific concepts such as the meme however contributes nothing towards this task, and merely makes media ecology appear to be a somewhat confused mish-mash of bastardised scientific concepts.
I think this is very important. Thanks a lot.
Brilliant! The term “meme” is part of the lexicon of social Darwinism, and it makes little sense outside of that philosophical excrescence, explaining perhaps why it’s so highly favoured by greedy neo-liberals and Ayn Rand obsessed fuckwits
Reminds me of the Victorian (and Thatcherite) vogue for blaming the poor for their poverty, explaining it as and inevitable result of their evident moral turpitude, and citing it as evidence of their innate inferiority to the mercantile or/and land-owning classes…
Sorry Sy, I’m not quite following you on this one. As far as I can tell from the above, the only way in which the analogy fails is by subjecting it to a quite extreme level of scrutiny.
I suspect that our difference of opinion here may simply be that I haven’t been exposed to overstatements of the usefulness of the meme concept that the above article is a reaction to.
The Selfish Gene is markedly out of date. I wasn’t able to make it through the book as this datedness was quickly apparent given that my area of interest is epigenetics (i.e. non-gene-driven changes in organisms’ function/appearance). However, the central ideas remain correct. My subjective judgement of the usefulness of memes (definately NOT my area of expertise) is that they can also form a framework of the ways that ideas spread without being the final word.
Either way, I suspect that rejection of the meme concept will be useful in aiding new thinking in your field as I agree that it is fundamentally an analogy and therefore bound to fail like all analogies when pushed far enough.
Lastly, I was surprised that, after lambasting reductionist and poorly analogous concepts, you chose a physical analogy (attractors) to orientate your media ecology research. This may simply be due to my lack of knowledge in your field and I look forward to learning more about these concepts in your future work
Tommy, I’m not sure I entirely understand your comment…
You agree that the Selfish Gene is outdated, and in fact your area of interest would not exist if the reductionist viewpoint Dawkins expresses were correct. But then you say the central ideas of the book, which in my view were that genes are the unit of evolutionary change and that evolutionary change is a result of just two processes, Mendelian inheritance and random mutation are correct? While they are important evolutionary processes, we have since discovered the existence of other, so I’m not convinced that’s right. Perhaps we took different things away from the Selfish Gene as being central to it?
‘My subjective judgement of the usefulness of memes (definately NOT my area of expertise) is that they can also form a framework of the ways that ideas spread without being the final word.’
While you can track changes in genes because they’re quantifiable units, you cant do this with ideas because they are not. Which is one of the reasons why the analogy doesn’t really work. I don’t consider this to be an extreme degree of scrutiny but a fairly basic examination. This may just be me being over critical, but memes really doesn’t seem like a useful way to approach the complexity and fluidity of ideas. They don’t exist as quantifiable units and the processes by which ideas replicate do not appear to be random mutation or something akin to Mendelian inheritance. So beyond saying genes evolve and ideas evolve the analogy seems to fall apart.
Finally with regards to attractors, I don’t consider it to be an analogy. Media systems are massively complex dynamical systems, as such using concepts which are elsewhere applied to understand dynamical systems seems appropriate. Despite claims of virtuality and informationalisation media systems are still physical systems incorporating humans, silicon, ir spectrum etc! Furthermore they are massively complex systems which are ‘open’ or dissipative insofar as they require flows of energy, be it food, water, electrons or attention to sustain themselves.
The use of complexity theory to analyse various scales of complex systems in the digital humanities comes from people like Manuel DeLanda… A short pdf which serves as an introduction can be found here http://www.mediafire.com/?qyznzgidwzd (the link off DeLanda’s biography seems to have died but this one looks like it works)
It’s interesting to see this point of view. I can’t say fore sure if I agree or not, but it is something I will think about now.
Ideas go through a process of descent with modification and selection. That is they evolve. (Look at how Christianity evolved within various environments from Dutch Reform to Liberation theology.)
To understand the process we need to study the material existence of a group of people as well as the existing ideas.
I think the assumption that there are memes is unhelpful to that study. The fact that the Journal of Memetics died through lack of fruitful research questions speaks volumes.
My book The Tangled Brain is an attempt to give some examples of the evolution of ideas,without using memes.
Your entire critique is that defining memes as “smallest quantifiable units of ideas” doesn’t make much sense? I checked with the dictionary. That is not, in fact how memes are defined there. I think your critique collapses at this point.
Hi Tim… Dictionary definitions are not standard and so I don’t have any idea which definition you are referring to. Are you claiming that memes were not introduced by Dawkins in ‘The Selfish Gene’ as a cultural analogue of genes?! Have fun with that argument…
The dictionary.com definition of meme is: ‘a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes’. The definition of gene is: ‘the basic physical unit of heredity; a linear sequence of nucleotides along a segment of DNA that provides the coded instructions for synthesis of RNA, which, when translated into protein, leads to the expression of hereditary character.’ So a meme is allegedly analogous to the ‘basic physical unit of heredity.’ The basic unit, building block or smallest quantifiable unit are all the same thing, and the notion of a basic conceptual unit of heredity is nonsensical.
It makes little difference which dictionary you use – since none of them say “smallest” – and that is what the critique in this post revolves around.