I was just reading this blog post about Memetics and my little brother who looked at my screen said, “There are people who study memes? Why? It’s just people posting shit.”
Memetics is such a joke.
The original concept — the meme as Dawkins defined it, a cultural analog to the gene — is a brilliant metaphor. It makes perfect sense. When I first heard about it, I thought, boy, that sure is a great concept. Wish I’d thought of it myself! Whoa, there, Dawkins, that has the potential to be huge. Really. Natural selection of ideas? Ideas as genes? Dude.
The problem is, it doesn’t teach us anything at all. It is a neato potato metaphor the study of which teaches us nothing about what it is a metaphor for. When was the last time you heard of anyone who had an original insight into how ideas spread, what kind of ideas spread, or why they spread, on the basis of memetics? Come to think of it, when was the last time Richard Dawkins, who invented the meme — who started the meme meme, you could say — had anything to say about memes? (Ok, he might have said that religion is a meme. But I do believe he could have said that perfectly well without invoking the meme. In fact he does, he compares it to a virus. And the insight is hardly groundbreaking, or very deep at all.)
There are these fields called psychology, and neurology, and the history of ideas. These all routinely produce analyses or new ideas about ideas. Even op-eds — plain fucking op-eds, more often than not written by idiots who would have failed if they turned their essays in for a high school class — come closer to understanding the anatomy of the successful (or not so successful) idea than memetics.
Consider me infected by the anti-memetics meme, whose phenotype exhibits an interesting morphology: it writes angry blog posts.
