[Air-L] Meme Tracking

Tof Eklund tof.eklund at aut.ac.nz
Sat Jun 10 14:27:12 PDT 2017


Is it possible we're speaking past each other here?

David is establishing that Richard Dawkin's concept of the "meme" has been completely debunked.

It is also true that hundreds of millions of people use the word meme to describe certain kinds of online activity in a way that has largely separated from Dawkin's concept but still bears traces of it, as with the use of the word "viral" in the context of memes.

At this point, it seems to me that it would be irresponsible for scholars to refer to Dawkins' concept as if it were sociologically sound, but also disingenuous for us to come up with a neologism to describe the *popular* understanding of pictures of cats with silly captions and short looping videos as the same kind of thing. I find the cultural use of the term is fascinating.

I'm personally fond of this flowchart, which regularly gets shared as (pop cultural) meme in response to Dawkin's latest Islamophonic tirade:

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image1.JPG
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 11866 bytes
Desc: image1.JPG
URL: <http://listserv.aoir.org/pipermail/air-l-aoir.org/attachments/20170610/c7df778a/attachment.jpe>
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: ATT00001.txt
URL: <http://listserv.aoir.org/pipermail/air-l-aoir.org/attachments/20170610/c7df778a/attachment.txt>


More information about the Air-L mailing list