Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id QAA09759 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Tue, 24 Oct 2000 16:22:22 +0100 User-Agent: Microsoft Outlook Express Macintosh Edition - 5.0 (1513) Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 11:21:54 -0400 Subject: Re: Wimsatt on memes at the Uni Pittsburgh From: William Benzon <bbenzon@mindspring.com> To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Message-ID: <B61B209F.5324%bbenzon@mindspring.com> In-Reply-To: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3101745AB8@inchna.stir.ac.uk> Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> From: Vincent Campbell <v.p.campbell@stir.ac.uk>
> Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 15:00:23 +0100
> To: "'memetics@mmu.ac.uk'" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
> Subject: RE: Wimsatt on memes at the Uni Pittsburgh
>
>> It can go both ways, but memetrics has done neither.
>
> Agreed it can go both ways and I'd admit I've yet to operationalise memetics
> in either way, although I've been thinking out loud on this list about doing
> so. I can't speak for others, but there can be a huge amount of personal
> and professional livlihood involved in associating oneself with new,
> untested theory, that makes it not straightforward to just come out of the
> closet and get on with, let alone the mention of access to research funding.
Well, I understand this. As far as I'm concerned, the academic world is
pretty much over on a whole bunch of issues. It's locked into a 19th
century institutionalization of intellectual labor and isn't going to change
anytime soon.
Good luck.
> This sounds like bibliometric work to me, which doesn't examine the
> processes by which certain authors/ideas come to dominate, which would seem
> to be memetic questions. The fact that certain concepts are labelled and
> then spread through an academic (or any other) population are easy to map
> numerically and chronologically, but memetics asks another question about
> the attributes of that concept that make it spread ('because it's right'
> isn't good enough of course).
Well memetics may have asked the question, but it has said nothing usefull
by way of an answer. It just talks of replication while ignoring any
substantial discussion of the machinery of replication or of just what is
being replicated. The word "meme" is just a token that means "whatever is
being replicated."
> So, the 'how' of a phenomena isn't
> (necessarily) revealed by the measurement of it. That's kind of the central
> question of memetics- we know social phenonema occur, but we don't know how
> they are transmitted, how they start, or how one phenomena as opposed to
> another spreads incredibly rapidly across a population.
>
> After all, memetics itself has clearly spread through a number of
> populations (I've started seeing it appear in newspaper articles now so
> journalists have cottoned on to it), but how, if it's just a hollow,
> unsubstantiated, un-researched concept?
But it's not memetics that's spread. What's spread is just the word "meme"
and different morphological variants. There's no substantial theory or
model attached to that word in the popular mind.
Surely there's no particular mystery about the spread of "unsubstantiated,
un-researched concepts"? The word is short and catchy and useful. So it
spreads. Now, if you want a deeper explanation than that, well OK. But
memetics doesn't have one.
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