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Review:The Meme Machine
from the The-Mind-as-Virus dept.
| The Selfish Meme | |
| author | Susan Blackmore |
| pages | 264 |
| publisher | Oxford University Press |
| rating | 6/10 |
| reviewer | Jon Kaz |
| ISBN | |
| summary | Minds Are Memes |
Oxford Professor and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins launched the idea of the meme in 1976 his now famous book "The Selfish Meme" with these words: "when you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propogation in just the same way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell."
The meme was born, one of the most interesting and timely ideas in media and/or culture.
The idea that ideas are infectious is radical and controversial. To this day, prominent scientists like Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould argue that the meme is a "meaningless metaphor." Other academics (H.Allen Orr, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Rochester) complain that memetics is nothing more than "cocktail-party science."
But the idea has taken hold, especially on the Net, where memes are launched every second and spread just like microbes. (If you want to see how memes work, study the recent writings about Weblogs, on Slashdot and elsewhere, and how the notion has spread electronically into the culture). Information viruses such as memes, wrote Dawkins, follow natural laws much like those governing the change and transmission of biological viruses.
Dawkins saw memes as a unit of cultural evolution. He considered ideas as replicators, working in the exact same way as microbiological organisms like viruses to do spread through the culture. Memes are transmittable, infectious.
Dawkins didn't have the Internet in mind when he coined the term, but new technologies like the Net and TV spread memes faster than was ever possible, elevating his theory.
Big techno-driven media are fusion meme machines: God is Dead, OJ was Framed, Video Games Turn Your Kids Into Killers, Kids Don't Need Parents, the Paparazzi killed Diana, Boris Yeltsin is crazy, a missile shot down TWA Flight 800. Monica and the dress was a nuclear meme.
But according to Dawkins and other memeticists, memes come in all shapes and sizes. They shape culture and politics, through movies, music, books, lectures and word-of-mouth.
In "Wired Style," author Constance Hale defines a meme as a "contagious idea," also as a "virus of the mind," or "unit of cultural inheritance." An especially infectious idea, she says, is a "viral meme." These replicating thoughts are to cultural inheritance what genes are to biological heredity.
When most people talk about memes, they are describing discrete units of knowledge, information, gossip, jokes, faiths. Memetics is the belief that just as biological evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest genes in the gene pool, cultural evolution may be driven by the most successful memes.
In his smart, useful and very clear-headed book about memes - "Thought Contagion, How Belief Spreads Through Society" - Aaron Lynch took Dawkins' idea a step farther. In memetic evolution, he wrote, the hardiest ideas aren't always the most helpful but the ones that are simply the best at replicating.
Despite their growing popularity, memes remain controversial, and they just got more so. Susan Blackmore, a professor at the University of the West of England has elevated the meme to whole other plane - with the blessing of Dawkins, who has written a foreword for her new book.
In "The Meme Machine," (Oxford University Press, US $25), Blackmore argues that memes account not only for the evolution of culture but also for consciousness itself. The mind, she believes, is essentially a nest of memes. The mind is essentially -- and almost entirely -- a vehicle for virulent notions.
"Everything that is passed from person to person is a meme," writes Blackmore. "This includes all the words in your vocabulary, the stories you know, the skills and habits you have picked up from others and the games you like to play. It includes the songs you sing and the rules you obey. So, for example, whenever you drive on the left (or the right!), eat curry with lager or pizza or coke, whistle the them tune from "Neighbors" or even shake hands, you are dealing in memes. Each of these memes has evolved in its own unique way with its own history, but each of them is using your behavior to get itself copied.
Blackmore brings us laboriously to a final point of reference and conclusion, to the nature of the inner self, the part of us that is the center of our consciousness, that feels emotions and has memories, holds beliefs and makes decisions.
Some people call this the soul, or the spirit. Blackmore calls it the "inner self." Her argument is that this inner self is an illusion, a creation of relentless memes for the sake of their own replication.
It's nearly impossible to understand this theory, or how it squares with biology or genetics, let alone buy it. We don't just transmit memes, says Blackmore. Memes 'R Us.
This book is a sorry illustration of how to take a great idea and bury it under much more weight than it can possibly bear. Blackmore's writing is academic, dry and loaded with incomprehensible notions like the "memeplex," her memetic inner self. The book reads almost as if some 12-step therapist co-opted memes for her next group therapy session.
If Dawkin's original thesis was brilliant and simple, Blackmore's is impenetrable. In his foreword, Dawkins says he is "delighted" to recommend Blackmore's book, triggering a personal meme. He's a generous man.
Humans are two kinds of thing, Blackmore has concluded: meme machines and selves. Having read this several times, I have no idea what it means. Or why anybody would care.
It's almost impossible to pay attention either to media or the Web and not believe in memes and memetics, whatever the academics say. Ideas are infectious, and they do move through the culture like viruses. In a way, columns, posts, software programs, even flames are memes - they spread precisely like viruses, and they do replicate as units of cultural evolution.
Anybody on the Net sees this almost everytime they get online.
Technologies like TV and the Net have given memes powerful new ways in which to travel and replicate. That makes them significant, a social, business and political tool as well as a cultural idea. Memetics do affect all of us, and ought to be taken more, not less, seriously.
But books like "The Meme Machine" will have the opposite effect. Memeplex theory in this form is loopy, not revealing or penetrating.
Blackmore has taken an important idea and made it obtuse, almost ridiculous. Anybody interested in the idea would do a lot better to get Dawkin's landmark The Selfish Gene or Lynch's blessedly excellent, clear and direct study (published last year by Basic Books, $US 26) of contemporary memes, and how they affect politics, media, culture and thought.
If you still want the Blackmore book, pick it up at Amazon.
I'm loving this book (Score:3)
But then I've not finished the book so maybe I'm destined to be disappointed. Even if that's the case, though, you've not managed to mention any weakness in the book that isn't really a weakness in the reader.
intangibles and junk science (Score:3)
I hardly think it fair to call Mr. Katz's characterization of the material to be a reflection of himself rather than the book. Psychologists make an interesting career out of studying intangibles. Many great things have come out of psychology. In the end, however, one is studying intangibles. As such, the field and the results derived from it can only be taken so seriously.
Like all of the soft sciences (aka social sciences, humanities) it is very difficult to support theories with hard experimental data. In physics and chemistry, theories are (relatively) easily proven over and over with independent scientists verifying others' work. In psychology, however, one may construct theoretical models to characterize concepts and states of reality as we know them without much accountability.
When a chemist finds a new method of synthesis, the results are tangible, you can hold the them in a bottle. Likewise when a physicist tinkers with the forces of nature (ie, superconductors lifting massive weights off the ground, etc). Even the most abstract theories such as Quantum Mechanics (my specialization) can be proven through rigorous (though arcane) experimentation. We have even reached the point in theoretical chemistry that we can predict the results of a chemical reaction (no small accomplishment, let me assure you).
Phsychologists, however, are doomed to study a system in which they are handicapped by the ultimate bias: they are the systems they study. Therefore, while they may be learned and know important things about the human mind and consciousness, going past a certain depth or level passes the point of usefulness or meaningfulness.
The initial descriptions of what a meme is, as quoted from Dawkins' book, seem simple and useful enough. (Take the most serious note of that, for most important truths are simple.) Memes seem to me, from what I'm reading here, to be soundbytes. Short, catch-phrases without meaning or depth-of-thought. Then, however, Blackmore declares, "Everything that is passed from person to person is a meme,". Oh? What evidence brings her to say that? Are we now saying that memes are the packets in the human internet we call civilization? If so, do they vary in size or are they standardized? If they're standard how many memes make up the complex concepts expressed in mathematics, physics, and chemistry? How do memes (if they are building blocks) fit into interpersonal relationships? According to Blackmore, it's all memes. Based on what evidence? Based on what observations? Who decides? If we're spending all this energy to just *define* what a meme is, is it really so important? What will we gain from this analysis? Insight? Inner peace? Enlightenment? Thank you, but people have been getting all that from religion and philosophy for centuries now. So is psychology now the religion of the "post-modern" era? (another term I find meaningless). Bottom line, where's the science? Isn't that what psyhcology is supposed to be, a science?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for religion, inner peace, greater self-introspection. I'm very devout in my faith, but let's not mix our disciplines here.
In the end, I can guess at Blackmore's motivations. It is, of course, these motivations that dictate the quality of her work. I've been a member of Academia long enough too see how it works. The Publish or Perish code in Universities runs deep and runs strong. Professors are denied tenure and or promotion on the basis of what they can churn out. Quantity, not quality. Like everywhere else in our information (not idea) based society, truely meaningful thought and dialog are being drowned out in a sea of news, facts, data, bits, and bytes.
From all I've seen, the concept of the meme peaked in usefulness and meaningfulness with its introduction in Dawkins' book. Let it be a name for the flotsam of the sea of information we're drowning in. I've noticed of late that on Slashdot, if you don't post early after a story goes up, you'll either be the last one on a list of 200+, or no one will read your thoughts because ever more new stories are getting posted and the piece of news at the bottom of the page just isn't as interesting as what's at the top. Given the time differential between the story (and inital comment's) posting and my post, I doubt this essay of mine will even be ready by many more people than the fellow to whom I'm responding (if he even looks at his user page). I'm sure it won't get moderated up any, after all, who's reading this story now anyway? There's more intersting stuff going on right now, who cares about then. There's no time anymore for introspection or analysis.
Too many memes, too little time.