Lake Superior State University (Lake Superior is a state?) does the world a favor every year by maintaining this list of banished words for the year—words and phrases that have been generally overused and abused through no fault of their own. These are the sorts of utterances that make you wish there was such a thing as copyslap; the ability to just slap someone who uses them after their reasonable expiration date. As you can see from my own mutation above, the phrase “Orange is the new black,” and its innumerable iterations are a particular architecture of bone-picking with me.¹ Definitely, a second runner up is the phrase, “It is what it is,”—a phrase that requires more energy to utter than it has power to explain. In other words, to use that phrase is like letting the Universe die just a little.

The whole business of the media picking a catchy phrase or term and just beating it with the rubber truncheons of mediocrity, until the belief that it was ever clever in the first place seems about as remote as the possibility of a blonde cable news anchoress being ugly, makes me want to email Susan Blackmoore to let her know that she could some up her talk in about 19 fewer minutes by simply pointing out that all memes are bad.² I’m very certain that George Orwell would agree. These phrase fads are just bad for all of us. They reduce conversation to a level of bipolar uselessness. The funny thing is, I really don’t blame us. That is to say, I don’t want to <sarcasm>throw modern culture under the bus</sarcasm>.³ I do think the media is to blame, the Media with a capital ‘m’, that is—the crew that’s a shill for paid advertising and wouldn’t know a serious story if it stopped them in a dark parking garage. You just don’t hear this kind of regurgitated drek on PBS Frontline. We hear these phrases over and over again and it induces a laziness of thought, a willingness to give in to the agenda of other people’s choice of words, rather than making the effort to think of something new for yourself. I don’t think it’s the end of the world or anything, but it just adds to the drudgery, you know?

So, I’ll end this bitter goodbye to the sheep-thought of 2008 with a New Year’s resolution for the writing on Banapana in 2009.⁴ In the coming year, I resolve to do my best to not use but identify these black holes of ingenuity and only mention them when I intend to call them out. Enjoy and Happy New Year’s Day to you!

Here’s a cloud constructed from all the tags used here at Banapana:

Here’s just a cloud of the front page of Banapana:

At least with the tag cloud, I’m glad to see that media is the largest word, since that’s what this blog purports to be about!

With this reasonable comparison in mind, Barr turns toward the concept of the meme. Within the mind, the concept of competing ideas cannot be true. It is merely a mixed-metaphor brought over to psychology from Darwinian concepts of biological evolution. He says:

…The common sense notion that ideas are selected by some obscure competition between objective alternatives … finds an equal bridge to selectionist principles that are derived from biology. Thus, just as Newtonian physics and common sense physics seem to confirm each other, common sense psychology and Darwinian biology share similar metaphorical principles that explain respectively how behavioral and biological selections are made.

Barr mainly argues that ideas are selected by competition and thereby misses the definition of the meme. The key thing that Richard Dawkins was arguing when he introduced the concept of the meme was the more general concept of the replicator. At the time of his writing of The Selfish Gene [Amazon link] Dawkins was attempting to find natural, basic constructs in nature that could replicate themselves — and do little else. He pointed to genes but he also pointed to viruses, computer viruses, and prions. As an aside he argued that ideas may have some capacity to replicate themselves from individual to individual, but he was not arguing that human behavior could be described by an individual mind’s competition of ideas.

And here’s where it gets tricky. Yes, meme’s can be passed from individual to individual competitively through the use of media (language, music, speech, etc.) and although they can influence behavior, they are not the only thing that does. To understand the concept of the meme it is crucial not to confuse it with perception (such as the color blue or the feeling of cold) or even information. It is a kind of data and a kind of data based on a experiential context.

A meme exists as an extension of our ability to utilize media to communicate with one another and ourselves.[1] Without media (including “natural” media such as speech) there are no memes. Perception and information come from reality and in the desert of the real our connections are our own. It is only in the shared light of media that human consciousness begins to create, trade and disseminate memes.

I have often said that what is funny is that which is wrong. A man slipping on a banana peel. That’s not a duck it’s my brother. Did Paris Hilton just fall in to a vat of… whatever. You get the idea. The joke is the meme. The tune is the meme. The fashion is the meme. The graphic is the meme. The perceptions that come before it are not memes and no more unique to our consciouness than they are to dogs and monkeys. Flat, far, and cold are not memes. But how flat, far, and cold have to do with our ex-wives is definitely a meme.

The most important embodiment of a meme is its symbolic notation. It is not that the meme exists outside of the evironment of the individual mind but rather that the meme within the mind is formed when new connections between older memes or perceptions are created through the feedback loop that is the act of observing media. Although memes do not carry the weight of information or value, they can create value within the human mind.

To touch on Barr’s point once more, meme’s are not responible for your behavior, but they may influence it. Barr seems to place memes on a higher level than necessary. Fear is not a meme. It is an instinct, something received through a mechanism other than media (natural or nurtured). I would not posit that memes could possess information nor transmit it. I would however posit that there is a meme in the connection between sex, cold, blue and Sunday morning. And there is most certainly a meme in the ability of an author to choose the words “sultry sullen Sunday” and create within our mind (if the prerequisite experiences are available to us) a new connection between perceptions — a connection you may not have possessed or imagined.

I will finish with Barr’s statement of this:

Thus, we select not only memes, but also the abstract relationships between memes as they are moderated by our thoughts and overt behavior.

But memes are the reversal of this. They are in fact the abstract relationship itself. And sometimes it is that abstract relationship, such as love, that can very much be a driving factor in our behavior.

[1] Daniel Dennett most convincingly makes this argument in Consciousness Explained [Amazon link] when he explains that the act of writing is a kind of feedback loop in which one observes one’s own thoughts and thereby reflects on them in a manner not possible without media (in this case, the medium of language)

General Reference:
The Channel Mob

By the by, I put this lovely little posting in Meme Safari because Andy Balo over at waxy.org says he’s identified a new meme—the supercut.  Check out his article on the supercut to see more wonderful and ridiculous edits of movies and shows.  And even though it technically doesn’t fit the supercut mememold, I’m just going to mention the Vader Sessions again because it’s still hilarious.