This nine-minute video of Richard Dawkins begins as a lecture on memes—an idea that has never excited me—and seems pretty straightforward except for Richard’s aloha shirt (a nice one, too).
At 4:57, he grabs both his notes and the podium and strides offstage. All hell then breaks loose, with Dawkins appearing electronically as a Great Oz Head with all kinds of animated accountrements (watch for the cat at 6:39 and the dancing Asian “good luck” cats eleven seconds later).
At 7:51, Dawkins returns and plays some lovely electronic music on what reader Peter Nothnagle says is an Akai EWI USB.
I’m not sure I get the whole schtick (it’s one of a series of Saatchi and Saatchi “New Directors’ Showcase” videos released at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity), but, hey, you can’t say the guy is an art-hating advocate of scientism. And I do like the musical coda.
Curiously, the irascible Andrew Brown attacks this video in the Guardian, claiming that it is itself a failure as a meme:
There are some deliberate forms of parody which enjoy a year or two of fame. Older readers will remember Downfall videos and even lolcats. But here, too, the humour derives from incongruity: from the message being wrenched out of its original context. And this in turn points at the fatuity of the meme concept if it is intended (as it was) to be a serious account of cultural transmission. It is entirely without reference to meaning. What can be copied – and what is – are simple patterns of sound or words or pictures. But what makes these things worth communicating is their meaning. And in the video above you see the perfection of something designed to be copied without any meaning at all.
I agree insofar as “memetics” largely ignores the psychological reasons why some ideas spread and other’s don’t, but those reasons often have little to do with meaning. (Think of Dawkins’s classic example: of a meme discussed in Unweaving the Rainbow, a brain-invading jingle from Mark Twain’s story A Literary Nightmare:
Conductor, when you receive a fare,
Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare,
A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare,
A pink trip slip for a three-cent fare,
Punch in the presence of the passenjare!CHORUS
Punch brothers! Punch with care!
Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
We’ve all had phrases or songs like this stick in our head for hours or days, unable to dispel them. Their tenacity has little to do with their meaning.
What’s ironic, though, is Brown’s insistence the video above is a failed meme because its purpose “is to get linked and spread” despite its lack of content. Yet Brown himself ensures its spread by calling its attention to readers. Put up five days ago, it’s already garnered over 313,000 views.
For my own critical take on memes, see my review in Nature of Susan Blackmore’s book The Meme Machine (free online).
“What’s ironic, though, is Brown’s insistence the video above is a failed meme because its purpose “is to get linked and spread” despite its lack of content.”
Is Brown applying the adaptationist approach to memetics? or does he not understand that spreading and increasing in frequency, no matter the reason, is the hallmark of a successful meme?
“…no matter the reason…”
What is Brown on about with all that “meaning” business? As you say, a meme might be successful simy because it is superficially catchy, or because of what it “means” to people, or etc, or etc…
And “meaning” is so vague as to be useless when applied generally like Briwn has. You might be able to discuss the meaning of a particular chord progression if you also define “meaning” so as to make your explanation intelligible, say, how the individual chords in the progression relate to each other given the harmonic hierarchy in tonal music. That’s just one example. The point is that you’ve got to get specific in order to give…well, meaning to discussions about “meaning”.
What is the meaning of a symphony? It’s a nonsense question.
Geez. Pardon the typos.
Not a fan of the “meme” concept (as anything more than a superficial metaphor, which it seems to have been from the start, anyway). There’s just too much accumulated work that shows a replicator model for “ideas” is hopelessly flawed. And face it… “memes” in this context ARE ideas. Show me one application of the word “meme” (in this context) that doesn’t mean “idea”, and I’ll eat my shorts.
A better model methinks seems to be more Vygotskyan… who, though discredited early on (and sometimes containing some kind-of flaky stuff), seems to have hit it spot-on with the general workings of ideas and language. These things (ideas) don’t exist as abstractions that get replicated more-or-less intact, but are things that evolve through USE… sometimes radically… through working with them in linguistic processes that are pretty well understood and contain quite a few cross-cultural similarities.
One of those similarities is a process of “banalization” of concepts, through their use, appropriation in various contexts, workings and re-workings of them… a good general rule of thumb is the MORE stupid, insipid, and devoid of content something is, the better it catches on. More people seem to “get it” (or think they do), and it catches on through embodiment in language… words… use. So rather than a game of telephone tag, it’s more like a giant pissing contest, with large GROUPS of people taking whatever it is, peeing all over it, pawing and licking it, and rubbing it with huge numbers of grubby hands and other more stinky body parts, working it over into other tarnished and more nondescript shapes until eventually most people go “eeew” and drop it in the dirt.
So something like this “presentation”, which seems to start off like a talk – and ends up getting more abstract and devoid of content that people can actively “disagree on”, would be PRECISELY the kind of thing that gets picked up as popular. Witness the number of hits on this vid in so short an amount of time. Witness the Grammy Awards. Witness the “meme” concept itself, as it now means “picture of animal in cute situation with snappy lolzy block of words beneath it” — to MOST people.
Witness religion. Nitwitness religion. Witless religion. Witless nitwits. Jehovah’s nitwits. See what I did there?
Memes – according to most common definitions – are socially transmitted ideas. Plenty of ideas are not memes – since they never leave their originator’s cranium. Complaining that memes are just another name for an idea misses this point.
I suppose in one sense. In the other sense of “idea”, the one I think that “meme” describes, the idea is actually a word.
So perhaps an equivalent word for “meme” is not “idea”, but “word”. One of the weird ideas I have not been able to shake is that there don’t really seem to be ideas without words. Seems like there are at first glance, but we seem even to THINK in words. People using different languages and different language constructs actually think differently… according to those constructs.
The only possible “memes” I can think of that are not “words” would be non-verbal stuff like some difficult to describe musical sounds, of this-or-that dance gesture, or some other abstract stuff. But then again, they don’t seem to get transmitted until people invent words (or other more concrete languages like musical writing) to describe them, and talk about them and USE them. And incidentally, when words get used, the words change in proportion to how often they get co-negotiated, co-constructed in groups.
So I must eat my shorts, and change “ideas” to “words” in my above assertion. Memes still seem to me to be a fancy way of saying “words”. And those that keep going on about memes seem to be missing THIS point… one well established by mountains of work in linguistics and phonemenology (not phenomenology – augh. word problems). The mechanisms of transmission of ideas seem to me to be different enough to make the analogy with gene transfer and mutation an inept one.
There are, in fact, plenty of non-verbal memes. Classical music, for instance. Or dance styles. Or baby slings. Or stone axes. This is all part of memetics 101.
I seriously wonder IF we didn’t have stone axes AFTER we were using words to think about them, describe how to make them, etc. Not memetics 101. Unanswered questions in archaeology. Same with baby slings. Which came first, the baby sling or the words (which clarified and solidified our thoughts) that needed to be in place to even make baby slings possible.
In any case, I’m halfway through my shorts. God, they taste awful. I’m not sure I have a word yet to properly describe what I’m experiencing at the moment… oh, I know… meme. 😉
I thought you were supposed to “eat your hat”. This “eating shorts” business is unfamiliar to me. Did you get that idea from someone else? 😉
Must’ve transferred directly from Bart Simpson’s brain to mine. 😉
I think it may have passed directly from Bart Simpson’s brain to mine… 😉
I love the solo on the weird instrument. Whatever its real name is, I can only think of it as Fry’s holophonor from Futurama’s episode “The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings”.
Sometimes it’s called an “electronic recorder”.
It’s a synthesizer for people who play a woodwind instead of a keyboard. They make a trumpet version, too.
Pretty unexpected to see Dawkins play an EWI.
I had to skip the techno-pop… just ain’t my bag. Really loved seeing Dawkins playing, though. Made my morning.
Here’s the late, great Michael Brecker, tearing up an EWI, for those inclined to the jazz-fusion genre. Every one of those musicians is (or was) a shining star – hopefully you can tell, even if you can’t stand the stylings for one reason or another. And if you do like what they are doing, the Barcelona concert is a good way to spend an hour.
Another use for an EWI by Mike Phillips. — feeding it into a vocoder.
At first I thought it was going to be merely another cheesy autotune monstrosity, but this guy has got enough chops to make it interesting, methinks.
I once had ABBA’s Dancing Queen in my head for an entire exam. I figured it was just stress from studying.
I don’t really get this whole thing either but it would have been awesomer if there were more Theremin. 😀
And cowbell!
Yes to theremin and cowbell! Also noted: one-second oasis of normalcy @ 6:33.
Luxury. I spent the whole of my finals with Sister bloody Sledge going through my head.
The horror.
Ha ha. Well I’m glad I’m not the only one things like this happen to. Usually when I tell the story people just look at me funny.
IMO, Dawkins is a much better writer than speaker or musician. The whole clip is 3 times too long and somewhat boring.
I think it is pretty amusing and the screen they used for the animation is pretty amazing.
Reblogged this on Beacon of Aquarius and commented:
Posted by Beacon of Aquarius June 27, 2013
It’s pretty obvious whoever made that has spent far too many of their working hours messing about on b3ta. Surprised not to spot any surreptitious CDC in there.
Intriguing idea, but they could have done a much better job with 1200 μg.
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There’s a lot to be said about memes, most of which is fruitful once people stop treating it like an all-or-nothing idea.
The video was interesting, now I want one of those instruments.
LSD Dawkins?
He stole Jerry’s shirt!
Thanks for the Mark Twain reference-and I thought I knew all his stuff!- which also calls up Gainsbourg’s “Poinconneur des Lilas” (can’t be arsed with the missing cedilla)… The real treats here are Brown’s insistent,imbecile obsession with the great Professor, and also his apparent ignorance of the origin of the word “meme”.
Similarly, genetics largely ignores the reason why some genes spread and others don’t. It instead is concerned with how genes mutate, associate and recombine. That isn’t a flaw in genetics, it is a matter of how the field is divided between specialists in different areas. For studies of cultural selection pressures, look to cultural evolution or cultural ethology – where most of the of work on this has been done.
Quite interesting, yes… esp. given my training (cut short) in biochem. Lots to think about. It will be interesting to see how memetics progresses (spellchecker still thinks “memetics” isn’t a word. nor “spellchecker”).
I still have a tough time thinking of the field (in light of the work in linguistics, etc.) as more than etherology. Makes sense on a zillion levels – just was found to be without basis. It’s not like there’s a background conduit with which ideas zip around… we keep talking and arguing about them. The only thing I can think of that comes close is embodied imitation that animals do without words… teaching your young to use sticks to poke at ants, for instance.
Even the classical music (I trained as a pianist in my youth – for 12 years)… I have trouble thinking about what memes actually ARE, if not words. I learned NOTHING of that stuff, besides some crude imitation, without a mountain of concepts embodied in verbage. And its history is entwined with motives and patronage and religious thought that could only have existed with culture, words…
Lots to think about in any event. And for that, I thank you VERY much.