A.J. Marr has written an excellent essay on the notion of the meme and why he believes it to be essentially a poor metaphor for the complexities of human behavior. It is well-researched and thoughtful, but in the end, relegates the concept of the meme to the land of mixed metaphors and gives it too much credit of control over human behavior. Read more…
It’s all clear to me now… Such statements tend to be followed by a real gem of insight or total insanity. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you which is to be the case regarding what follows. What I believe I have done is construct a relevant and interesting thesis for a book that I am writing concerning the human mind, memes and the media. It makes sense to me anyway. Read more…
In his 1991 work “Consciousness Explained” Daniel Dennett discusses Richard Dawkins’ idea of the idea replicator (the meme [google dfn.]). He provides a list of what he would consider memes but eliminates certain basic concepts from the list, leading to the question: Where does the meme begin? Read more…
One of the problems with the meme construct is that many memes would seem to exist independently of other memes and perceptions while simultaneously depending on other meme’s existences. The simple “units of cultural transmission” that Richard Dawkins first spoke of would appear to be paradoxically complex. Read more…
On January 5th of this year Bill Gates, in an interview with CNET made a statement that irked quite a few people. After the interviewer asked Mr. Gates if he thought intellectual property laws should be reformed, Mr. Gates replied,
“No, I’d say that of the world’s economies, there’s more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don’t think that those incentives should exist.”
