From: Price, Ilfryn (I.Price@shu.ac.uk)
Date: Thu 24 Mar 2005 - 17:37:56 GMT
Kate
Are you saying memes are discourses (sensu Derrida an co). If so I am in full agreement.
I haven't got round to your book yet, though I confess to using the title as a section header in mine (Price and Shaw 1998 p162)
and I have just submitted 'The Selfish Signifier' to J Memetics.
As a matter of record whoever reviewed our book for Oxford University press found 'the selfish meme', and various others which we
proposed 'too cute" - that was ca 1996 so the world of academic publishing seems to have moved on or the meme meme has mutated
sufficiently to invade it.
If Price
>Kate Distin wrote:
>I see memes as representations. As such they gain their meaning from
whichever representational system they are a part of; and unlike genes
that may be one of many. Whereas genetic information is always
represented in the language of DNA, memetic information can be
represented in natural languages, in blueprints, in mathematical and
musical notation, or whatever. Equally each representational system can
be realized in a variety of media: paper, CD, speech, etc. So
ontologically a meme may be a piece of writing on some paper; it may be
a portion of speech on the radio; it may be a thought in a brain; etc.
This is a threefold picture: when we want to know about any particular
meme we need to ask what *information* it contains; how that information
is *represented*; and in what *medium* the representation is realized.>
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