PicoBlog

What is a meme?

To answer that question, most people will quote Richard Dawkins, who writes in his book The Selfish Gene (1976) that a meme is “a basic unit of cultural transmission” and memes, like genes, mutate and become widespread in a population through a process of natural selection (Dawkins, 192).

Following Dawkins’ logic, human culture has chosen Doge the same way human biology has chosen ears, and a meme (like the gene for ears) succeeds because it is best adapted to its environment and out-competes other rival memes for our attention. 

The idea is attractive—like many theories of everything, it feels nice to think it.  But following this definition prevents us from actually understanding what memes are and what they can mean for us. It is like taking a photo of an elephant but only including its butt in the frame. 

There are five ways in which I think Dawkins is wrong. The first is just historical, the next three more fundamental, and the fifth is just petty:

1) Dawkins wrote before the invention of the internet. The kind of thing he meant by “meme” in 1976 were “Fashions in dress and diet, ceremonies and customs, art and architecture, engineering and technology… tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches” (Dawkins, 193) — essentially, everything that makes up human culture. Memetics theory refers to all forms of cultural transmission, but when we talk about memes colloquially, we mean something specific and historically situated.

Using “meme” as Dawkins defined it is like using “paper” to name all written materials—it is too broad, and prevents us from seeing memes as their own thing. An image macro meme is not like a musical phrase, even though both would be “memes” to Dawkins. What we talk about when we talk about memes is not music or literature, but a uniquely internet-age phenomenon.

2) Dawkins never defines the size of a meme, nor does he say what a meme isn’t. The theory which Dawkins sketches out in The Selfish Gene is the theory of evolution mapped onto cultural history, with memes playing the role of genes. Dawkins says we can understand the way culture changes by equating our ways of making and receiving information to our ways of literally making other humans.

He brings up the “meme” as the “unit of transmission” while confessing that he cannot define its size. Whether the meme is the entire symphony, just one phrase in it, or just one note, is impossible to say—and for a ‘unit,’ isn’t size the most important parameter to know? Size matters here, and Dawkins admits this flaw in the book, writing the question isn’t quite resolved for genetics either.

the unit could be, for example, this big — but Dawkins fails to specify

3) Memes are not really in competition with each other. Dawkins argues that memes, like genes, survive because they are more competitive than other memes and reproduce themselves. But are memes really competing? Does posting a Stonks meme really affect the success of another meme format? Is online cultural space really structured by scarcity and competition the way ecosystems are?

Rip short king

This is the kind of point that I’m not quite so sure about, but I would say memes are not in competition with each other, because human cultural space is structured by power. The human ability to be interested in anything, like the internet’s ability to offer us access to anything (provided we have access to the internet), is essentially infinite. It is political and economic arrangements exterior to the memes that regulate our engagement with online content, not competition between memes.

A meme doesn’t go viral just because it outcompetes or is better than other memes, but because particular people and algorithms are served by its success. If there is a competition, it is between these people and algorithms and memes are the ball being kicked back and forth. Going with Dawkins definition feels like watching a football game but not paying attention to the players.

4) Memes are not random. A third problem with equating memetics and genetics hinges on the idea of randomness.  Change across cultural forms is not random the way that change in genetics is. Audiences, artists, algorithms, and social media platforms do not make errors in transcription during mitosis, but rather specific and intentional choices.  There are, of course, moments where a happy mistake becomes a great idea, or a chance encounter leads to something special—but online culture, overall, is undeniably the product of effort and thoughtful intention. People make choices, and those choices have consequences. It is not only analytically questionable but also politically dangerous to paint a picture of culture in which people’s choices don’t matter. Dawkins himself admitted this point in his 2013 talk “Just for Hits” saying that he was wrong and “internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity.” 

this is not what memes are, this is Science

5) Richard Dawkins is kind of cringe. Tying the entire study and culture of memes back to Dawkins is a bit cringe. His whole chapter describing memetics spends about three pages defining the idea of and then the rest diagnosing organized religion as a “memeplex” and grouchily implying everyone should be atheist (Dawkins, 197). Further, he’s the kind of writer who produces ideas that feel nice to think rather than ideas that offer a useful frame for navigating the world. I also am generally pissed when people try to borrow the cultural clout and truthiness of the hard sciences to prop up very wishy-washy humanities ideas, which is what Dawkins’ entire career is. It doesn’t serve either discipline.

Dawkins does not pass the vibe check.

We’re spinning our tire into the mud of Dawkins’ definition, and not going anywhere. No matter how hard we floor the accelerator, we can’t move forward because we aren’t thinking on a proper path.

So what is a better definition of “meme?” Here is my Opinion.

Memes and Différance

Memes really operate more like words in a language than genes in a population. Memes (and now I’m following the broadest possible Dawkins sense of the term, of memes as “cultural transmitters” of any kind) are all interrelated and don’t make sense without one another. This is why Dawkins has such trouble defining the size of a meme: one meme is every meme. 

Jacques Derrida writes about différance—how the meaning of any one term in a language relies on all the others around it. There is no “red;” just a set of relationships like “not-blue” or “near-to-orange” that scaffold a place in our brains into which we slot what we observe.

Jacques Derrida, who always seems to be doing “blue steel”

Because words in a language are more like knots in a net than beans in a can, no word in the whole set of words that make up a language can really be divided from the others and defined cleanly—as soon as you start pulling at a word and teasing out what it means, you find that you’re pulling up a quarter of the dictionary along with it.

Meaning is always either differed—that is, created by reference to another word, which is in turn created by reference to another word—or deferred, where it is defined by its relationship to a future that hasn’t yet happened, or a past that was long ago. The whole net holds tension distributed across each knot.

I think memes (now using a more limited definition, of memes as the internet phenomena we know and love) operate the same way: the meaning of a meme is always relational and contextual, no meme means anything on its own. Because memes can’t be pulled apart from one another, or from the platforms/people that produce and present them, a more useful analytic frame for studying memes is semiology. What we’re talking about when we talk about memetics is a practice of exchanging signs across networks, and all of those signs are meaningless without the other signs or the network connecting them. We’re not talking about evolution.

My Definition of “Meme”

Memes are the signs exchanged across those networks, but they are a specific kind of object. A DM is not a meme, but once you screenshot it and invite other people to like or look at it, it can become a meme. I would say there are two things that make a meme.

1) a meme is an invitation that takes place online.

A meme is like a digital handshake or head-nod. It’s a gesture made by humans in order make other humans do something. Memes are invitational gestures presented on interfaces and platforms that immediately and specifically respond to human action. Memes ask us to like, comment, look, share, subscribe, and create — each of these actions is then registered by the technology that presents memes to us, and deployed to create a fuller picture of who we are and who we can be like.

Much of this process is invisible, and the algorithms are not open for us to see. But some of it is on the surface, and can be discussed in a straightforward way. Memes invite us to construct selves and communities through our closely-recorded interactions with them.

2) a meme is meaningless unless it is used to mean something else

Doge ceases to be a dog and becomes Doge, Me and the Boys cease to be cartoon characters and become Me and The Boys. The meme becomes the meme and loses the context that once framed it (for example, authorial intent, historical setting). In the same way that /dɒɡ/ (spoken) is not a dog, and d-o-g (written) is not a dog, doge (memed) is not the social purpose we use it for. It is no longer a shiba inu, but something else.

The context which the meme takes on is the context of the digital communities that have used it. Memes become part of an online grammar that we use to communicate. Unlike a photograph, which many memes also are, a meme is not about something, but for something. We use them to explain, opine, and argue — not to show. Like words, they are tools we use to generate meanings that are totally unmoored from what they actually, originally are.

Memes as Haptic Language

Memes are signs that have, through online transmission, been turned into vehicles for other types of thought. The practice of speech turns sounds into meaning, the practice of writing turns squiggles into meaning, and the practice of scrolling/being online turns random memes into meaning.

Because I can say whatever I want on my Substack with no consequences, I will say that I think memes are the next evolution of human language after speech and writing.

Like spoken and written words, memes use a fundamentally arbitrary stimulus to communicate highly intentional content. Each harnesses a specific sense: speech is aural culture because spoken information is heard; writing is visual culture because written information is read; and memes are haptic culture because in a meme information is felt, in a spidey-sense tingling kind of way, as a vibe.

Our haptic sense is our awareness of where our bodies end, and how they are positioned in space. Using devices that extend our nervous systems across space and time by instantiating them in the form of computer data, memes entangle with algorithms to harness a sense of “who” and “where” you are in order to communicate concepts, in the same way that writing harnesses visual stimuli to do the same.

In the same way that writing is also speech (because most people tend to speak to themselves while reading, and letters correspond generally to sounds) I argue that memes are also speech and writing: we read to ourselves while memeing. Written language is to memes what spoken language is to written language.

If this seems way too grand a way of looking at memes, I think that’s just because we’re at the beginning of memes and the internet. Right now, the internet is still just a thing we choose to go to, even though we go to it constantly. We make the choice to open our phones and go on Aidan Walker’s Substack. We are not yet immersed in it in the same way that we are immersed in the spoken word and the written word.

The built environment and cultural and physical space are becoming increasingly connected to the internet, but digital technology hasn’t yet infiltrated our lives to the extent that writing has—you can’t escape writing, you probably think in writing, you go outside and you see writing. In the industrialized world, the written word appears on almost everything we eat, every object we use, and figures prominently in every relationship we have. Spoken words are the same way.

Soon, memes will be just as penetrated into who we are. Perhaps this will be because we live in the Metaverse, or perhaps it will be because we find ourselves plugged into an even more immersive tech surveillance system in the real world, constantly interacting and being stimulated by an internet of things that live on any item or human being we come into contact with. If we end up living under those circumstances, we will have memes everywhere.

Memes, Time, and Audiences

I said two paragraphs ago that speech is aural culture, writing is visual culture, and memes are haptic culture. More precisely (and inclusively, because speech is not always heard, and writing not always seen because of sign language and Braille) the difference I mean to tease out isn’t about sensation, but about the way perception is situated in time.

Speech takes place during a specific moment at a specific time, like hearing does: it’s there and then it’s gone. Writing takes place during a specific moment at any time you find the page, kind of like seeing: often, you look as long or as short as you like, and can more actively control when and what you see than you can when and what you hear. Memeing, which I call haptic culture, will feel like the sensation of our bodies in space does: ambient, often unnoticed, non-specific. Once the internet becomes immersive, memes will take place at all moments at all times: we essentially will always be interacting with computers and the internet, so memes will be in our brains the way written and spoken language are.   

But by meme, again, I mean symbolic invitations for exploitation and affiliation. And what I see here is a difference not only in the temporality of the sign, but in the direction it travels. Speaking is practiced as a one-to-one or one-to-some medium: we are in the same space and time as a person, listening to them. Writing is practiced as a one-to-all medium: you don’t have to be in a specific moment to encounter it, or a specific space. The reach of both speech and writing is of course impacted by power — who hears, who talks, who writes, and who reads have always been conditioned by factors outside the text. And, people have written things like diaries that are meant for nobody else or had their voices recorded so that everybody could hear them. But fundamentally, the technology used in both instances turns the sign towards a specific audience, and in everyday life we experience this: you may be communicating the same idea, but you’d do it very differently speaking than you would writing.

Memeing is a many-to-you medium: it is an invitation for affiliation and interaction, and it calls on you to make the messages in front of you your own. Speech and writing don’t do that, the sign remains fixedly on the lips or fingertips of one other person. But the meme is all about recognizing the specificity of the response you may have, and registering that specificity. 

A meme offers everybody who encounters it, regardless of what time and space they find it in, a specific and personal invitation to interact. It combines the personalism of speech with the universality of the written sign.  

These are just some ideas, very preliminary and not that fully thought-out. But the main thing is that I think Richard Dawkins is wrong. 

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