Memes and Memetics

 

Memes

Dawkins  defined meme as a noun that "conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation."

John S. Wilkins  defined the meme as "the least unit of sociocultural information relative to a selection process that has favorable or unfavorable selection bias that exceeds its endogenous tendency to change."

The meme as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person," regardless of whether that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme. 

A meme could consist of a single word, or a meme could consist of the entire speech in which that word first occurred. This forms an analogy to the idea of a gene as a single unit of self-replicating information found on the self-replicating chromosome.

While the identification of memes as "units" conveys their nature to replicate as discrete, a meme has no given size. Susan Blackmore  notes that  the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony  form a meme widely replicated as an independent unit, but one can regard the entire symphony also as a single meme. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

Definition of memetics: the study of memes

Memetics sees ideas as a kind of virus, sometimes propagating in spite of truth and logic. Its maxim is: Beliefs that survive aren't necessarily true, rules that survive aren't necessarily fair and rituals that survive aren't necessarily necessary. Things that survive do so because they are good at surviving.

— Los Angeles Times, 20 Mar. 1999

https://www.virtusa.com/digital-themes/memetics

Memeticist 

Some memeticists liken memes to viruses; others say they're closer to genes. [Robert] Aunger rejects both models. To him, a meme is more like a benign parasite that's incapable of reproducing without a host, the host being the human brain.

— Jay Kirk, Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2002

T. H. Huxley (1880): "The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals."

Memes and Theories and Ideas

Dawkins noted that in a society with culture a person need not have descendants to remain influential in the actions of individuals thousands of years after their death:

But if you contribute to the world's culture, if you have a good idea...it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today.   The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong.

Memetics and Marketing

Memetics and Marketing - A Google Book Page - Chapter 18 - Page 331 in The Routledge Companion to the Future of Marketing

Luiz Moutinho, Enrique Bigné, Ajay K. Manrai

Routledge, 2014  - 504 pages

https://books.google.co.in/books?id=38s0AwAAQBAJ

Available also at 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259528416_Memes_Memetics_and_Marketing_A_State_of_the_Art_Review_and_a_Lifecycle_Model_of_Meme_Management_in_Advertising

An Interesting Meme

On Independence Day, Zomato’s marketing strategy stole the show with a quirky social media post “Sorry, we aren’t accepting orders anymore – India, 15th August 1947”. Simple yet so witty!

https://www.financialexpress.com/brandwagon/why-brands-are-leaning-towards-meme-marketing/2332699/