At 10:03 AM 11/11/00 -0800, you wrote:
>At 12:42 PM 11/11/2000 -0500, you wrote:
>>i would like to understand the meme meme!
>
>As I understand it, meme is to society & culture as a gene is to an
>animal's body. The society and its culture (including technology, I
>presume) is seen as simply the sum of a bunch of memes, which spread sort
>of the way that genes do, a sort of quasi-Darwinian process. The followers
>of Dawkins see "selfish genes" as driving animals, which suggests that
>memes are similarly greedy, trying to conquer the world. (The more
>intelligent note that the spread of memes is more Lamarkian than
>Mendelian, since acquired cultural characteristics are passed on to the
>next generation.)
>
>But it's a really bad sociological theory -- though of course most of
>those who talk about "memes" sneer at sociology while practicing it.
this is exactly what i've thought of it. i am subscribed to a number of
hacker/geek lists and whenever someone challenges the dominant norms--say
bringing up challenges to their cyberlibertarian views--it is all dismissed
as a meme(s)--and evil at that! what is profoundly hilarious to me is that
a bunch of ppl hell-bent on the idea that they have the capacity for
rational autonomy--a mastery of their fate--can believe that memes can be
overpoweringly evil. i suppose it is an instance of what Alvin Gouldner
called "methodological dualism"--though i'm stretching it a bit. Gouldner
noted that sociologists tend to believe that somehow everyone else is a
dupe of social structure while they have, somehow, escaped that fate.
this, of course, fits nicely into the cyberlibertarian view that they are
the vanguard, that they will survive the darwinian struggle and the rest of
us be damned. in the meantime, tho, a fervent desire to squash anything
that disturbs them -- in their lexicon, a fnord.
so, in my mind, it's their convenient way of trying to understand the
forces of social structure which are unfathomable. leftish sociology and
marxism are, of course, out of the question so, like rightwingers and
conspiracy theories, they turn to meme theory to explain why things just
don't go their way.
pathetic, really.
kelley
