The Death of Memetics

The Death of Memetics: "

Meme: a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes.

Or so it used to be. I remember a time when memes were exciting. Units of cultural information. The viral (r)evolution. I recently declared that “memes died in 2005″ which created a lot of controversy among my readers. How can memes be dead?

I think that memes are dead because we no longer live in a culture where the strongest memes survive. We live in a culture that I have dubbed the great mashup of nothing. A perfect example would be the website Tumblr in which 90% of its users are rebloggers. They repost the images and videos of other users (Tumblr makes this very easy and even promotes itself based on this) without creating any original content. Are these people posting powerful memes that are generating into something greater? I think not.

It seems like everyone on the Internet acts like a 14 year old troll. Can I haz my culture back? I don’t think that lolcats are funny. They might as well symbolize the death of memetics. The fittest memes are parody macros. Can we say cyber-idiocracy?

From my readers:

“I hate how the term has been misused recently to describe internet cliches, macros, and just about anything else online.” -Dire Deparra

“This is something I’ve never been comfortable with. How does this word ‘meme’ come to mutate from being a concept Dawkins used to track cultural changes to being internet slang for ‘running joke’?” -Robert Bisno

If you would like to understand memetics I recommend reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (also author of The God Delusion) or The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore. I met Susan at a convention once (isn’t her dyed hair adorable?) and we talked for a bit about what memes had turned into. Was this evolution? I wish I had recorded our conversation. Dawkins and Blackmore did not envision graphics of slapstick violence as the future of memetics.

You can also check out their websites (Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore) to find out what memetics are really about. Let’s not let the evolution of ideas be killed by this new stampede of maggots.

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